okay. so i did nothing. now, it's been like--shit, i don't know--nine months since the damn pc worked.
one of my students, who is very handy with computers, told me to try to start it up and write down exactly what messages i got. he said from that, he'd be able to eliminate some possibilities, and we could go from there.
so today i pushed the button. and it started to boot windows. i got the scandisk, but afterwards, it booted fine.
i'm like, wtf?! why in the hell would it all of the sudden start working again, when months and months ago, it couldn't even read a harddrive?????