My problem was a bum hard drive. I'm not sure what caused it, but at some point my system stopped responding and after a cold restart, I could not progress past the gray apple logo and nice wheel loading screen. I could hear my hard drive sputtering as if it were trying to get fired up and failing. I never received an error, I just hung at this screen indefinitely (8+ hours while I was sleeping didn't make any progress).
I had backups of most things, save for some music I was working on earlier in the day. Luckily my sister's iMac was close by, and my Macbook is old enough to have a firewire port. I happened to have a firewire cable, so I booted up in Target mode (hold 't' after the apple sound during startup), and was actually able to mount my drive on sis's computer. It took me a long time to navigate my folder structure, but everything was visible after enough time. I took this to mean that my hard drive was merely crippled, and not gone.
I got the few files I needed and ran to Fry's to get a new hard drive. Replacing the HD on my macbook was nice and easy -- it sits kiddy corner to the ram -- however, finding the screw driver to mount the new hard drive in the easily removable case that my old one was in was not. It turns out that you need a Torx T8 screwdriver if you ever want to get the drive out again. Luckily Ace Hardware had it, and all I had to do from there was reinstall with the system discs.
Of course, to make things interesting, my CD drive has been broken for almost two years now, so I had to go back into target mode and do it from sis's computer. Luckily it all worked out and I'm back in the blogosphere, the twitterverse, and every other electronic habitat.
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