My almost two year old Dell Inspiron crashed last night.  Had been running fine all morning, got on last night and was trucking along just fine online when things started slowing down and I got the blue screen.  I did a hard shut down, waited a little while and restarted in safe mode.  It hung up and I restarted again.  Came online this time, was running OK for a few minutes and then got the same slow down along with a kind of a electronic chirping sound (not a clicking sound or buzzing, kinda like when a computer starts up or is "thinking")  again followed by the blue screen.  Somehwere in all of this, I had the sensation of a heat release from the machine, but nothing felt overly warm when I checked the sides and vent.  I shut it down again and let it rest overnight.  This morning I restarted it again, but got a black screen that said hard drive wasn't found.   I tried inserting the OS disck and restarting that way, and got a disgnostic screen that said everything was good but there was no hard drive installed.

Anyone have any idea what happened, if it's repairable, or if the data from the hard drive is recoverable?

It sounds like a dead hard drive. You might be able to pull the drive and recover some of the data by reading it from a different computer. Maybe.

Thanks, was afraid of that.  I jsut tried to crank it up again and just got a blank screen with soem error messages that said no boot device found.  Will see if I can find a repair service that can recover the hard drive.