Yes, that's right, my Asus laptop appears to have died on me. I was on my way to bed last night, stopped in the study to check my email before hitting the hay and it had locked up hard. I checked the hard drive wasn't being accessed and held the power button to power it off.

Now it won't power back on properly. I press the power button and it powers up but the hard drive access light goes on solid and the fan seems to go to full speed. It doesn't even seem to complete the POST. The really annoying (and embarrassing) tihng is that I didn't have a backup of $HOME so I've potentially lost all my documents, emails etc from, well, ever.

Thankfully, unlike when the last laptop (the infamous "Beast") died on me, this one is still under warranty so tomorrow afternoon - when I get back from the college quiet day - I'll be on the blower to Asus support. It's covered by a pick-up and return warranty in the event of it having to go back in. I'm hoping that the fact that it doesn't even complete the POST (not even displaying anything on screen) means it's not the drive itself but maybe the IDE controller that's at fault.