I think I screwed up in a monumental way tonight. My hard drive was very full so I tried transferring a large (very large) folder of audio files to my external hard drive. Sometime in the transfer, the whole computer froze. And so I did something I should NEVER do: take the battery out and restart. Usually that solves it.

Um... not this time.

Vista won't restart. At all. I got a black screen, then a BSOD saying:

STOP: c0000142 {DLL initialization failed}
Initialization of the dynamic link library winsrv failed. The process is terminating abnormally.

... then I restarted again, trying to restore from the last time the computer had booted normally. Black screen, then a large mouse-arrow... nothing else.

I don't know what to do. Mostly I wonder what I should do. I don't really want to SEND the computer back to Dell if I can avoid it. I want my stuff back. My works-in-progress (thank goodness I'd sent the fic I'm currently working on to jennijungle a few minutes earlier, so I got that back. But all my other files are there. Everything from videos to word files to music to everything.

I think I'm gonna cry now.