One nice thing about the shop today. The gentleman very kindly offered to show me where my hard drive was located. I pointed out to him that I have that, at least, figured out.
Knoppix works well with HP/Compaq abortions.
If that fails, it's a hardware problem.
Reboot on a reasonable OS first.
HD failures do happen, but they are very rare these days. It took me 2 drops to see my first one.
/johnny