Mutter mutter mutter

Wouldn't normally do this from work, but home laptop has decided to go fut! For some random reason it rebooted itselft last night (I overheard it while watching TV, but didn't check at the time) and now upon booting up it goes through a different sequence to usual and eventually decides it can't find any operating system. There should normally be Windows XP there.
Not a good start.
Luckily, any documents etc were back up about a week ago and only websurfing done since (and I still have the CDs for any music copied on), so shouldn't have lost anything in that respect (hence the resigned sigh, rather than manic gibbering in a corner), but still annoying.

Need to find out what to do now. Will do what I can to fix things before Z gets back on Sun, but suspect I may not be able to do much (though I think we have a boot disk round somewhere to see if theat helps to check state of things - no idea how to use it though). Not a fun thing to come back to for your week off.

So, probably little or no internet over the weekend then...

Edit: So from brief googling, either the instructions for finding the laptop harddrive (I assume the bit with the operating system on) are fragged, or the hard drive is fragged. Since this is a laptop, certain options (unplugging and replugging in the hard drive) are out. No idea which is the case, though I assume that one turns the laptop into a paperweight and the other is a little more workable around... No idea if we still have the Windows installation disc...