SvennoJ on 26 June 2012
I had the same problem, turned out to be the hdd. Bad sectors in very bad places.
I managed to recover most of the data by putting it in another pc as a secondary drive, but the boot sectors were fried and so were most of the system files.
Anyway what gave it away was a weird clicking noise from the hdd when the head moved. I was probably lucky to get as much data of it as I did.
