Welcome back Principessa, the hours seemd like years.
As a postsctipt to hard drive problems, I would like to describe and suggest what I use. I have my hard drive SMART turned on in the BIOS, and use a nifty utility named "Speedfan".
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php.
This program does a lot of stuff, but it allows you to access hard drive information, and learn about the hard drive's health and status.