It Lives! (knock on wood)

After spending the better part of the last nine hours wrangling my computer, I think it's finally coming back. Right now it's restoring the factory image to the new hard drive that I installed (rather easily) and then struggled for hours to get the motherboard to actually recognize as existing. In the end, it was a simple and absurd solution. What can I say, I'm not 1337...

And thankfully, I was able to recover most of the data I'd thought I'd lost... When I returned from my two weeks in the wilderness (details on that later) I, on a whim, fired up the heap. Magically, it started. I grabbed my mp3 player and a USB cable and started pulling data off. I got the photos first, then my documents (school papers, notes, letters, writings, etc.), then the miscellania. Last came mp3s and videos. I got less than halfway through my backup of my illicit property when the computer started making that grinding noise again, and eventually went back to the same blue screen I'd gotten before. No huge loss, however - I'd procured the most recent versions of my writings and the photographs from all my travels for the year, and I can always re-download or otherwise obtain anything else I might've had on there. The salvaged data has since been backed up in an additional two sources - my external hard drive (bought for music storage) and my work laptop (without which I'd be crippled in this whole repair process).