Mom needs a new hard drive.

It came up enough for me to check the logs. The system log was completely full of errors that just said "Hard disk" in red. No details about which hard drive but I was able to guess it was her main one.

I did a disk check that only got through the phase where it found and marked the bad sectors, and there were thousands of them. Then it hung.

I did the system recovery and THAT failed because the hard disk is damaged in the recovery sector, too. Mom didn't make recovery CD's because HP computers don't nag people to do that. I tried to order them when I got home only to find HP has discontinued support for her system.

Plan B happens today. I'll buy her a new hard drive and take one of our XP Home CD's over to install her OS again. At least HP puts the license key on the side of the computer so we have her license for it... if it will work. Sometimes the license key will only work with their recovery CD's. Grrr. Then I'll have to buy her an upgrade version of XP since she already has XP darn it! In any case, I'll get her up and running by tonight.