Can't be good.

Posting may be light in the coming days.

I came back to my office after an exam and my computer - which I had left on, the only program "open" was the campus e-mail client - everything on the screen was HUGE and the wrong color and there was some message about "shut down and restart NAOW!"

So I did. And got a blue screen telling me that because something was wrong, possibly in the BIOS, it would not open Windows. Also, the hard-drive light won't stay lit, which suggests to me the hard drive is failing.

Computer services said they'd "try" and clone the hard drive, hopefully things aren't so messed up that stuff is lost forever. (Most of my soil-invertebrate pictures, because of their size, are not backed up, and the stuff I was writing as a plan for the summer research I had not gotten around to backing up yet. We have an offsite "drive" for backups, but there's a fairly strict limit for what you can send to it.)

So I don't know. I really hope it isn't that the hard drive is totally gone - this is not that old of a computer. I will say that the Windows Updates had been hanging it up of late so I'm hoping that maybe that's what messed it up and the computer dudes can restore it. I don't know. I won't be happy if they can't. (At least all my exams are printed, so I'm not scrambling to re-write exams, and I can access the internet to submit grades and such from home).