In memorium, HP Pavilion a1560n. Alas, we had a lot of fun together.
Last Tuesday, my usual music-making night, it wouldn't start. The hard drive spooled up, fast and very loud, then crashed. Many attempts to restart it using Recovery Console, boot disk, multiple pushings of the button won't make it go. 
I'm glad that I have been regularly backing up, so not much was lost, but after over 13 years, I'm going to miss it.
 
Fortunately, my brother the programmer is giving me his computer (mentioned in the FSF a couple of weeks ago). It may need some more memory, and perhaps an OS upgrade, but it works. Plus he installed an E-Mu 0404 card in it so it should be ready to go as soon as he cleans off his personal stuff.
It has a FireWire port, too, but he can't remember if that's one of the things he connected. TBD.
Hmm. E-Mu 0404 and Patchmix. Anyone heard from RobertB lately?

57Gregy
Anyone heard from RobertB lately?

Not heard as such but he posted on FB yesterday.

Thanks, James. Friended him last night.
Well, I think we've always been friends since the Music Creator and Home Studio forum days, but I didn't know he was on FB until I looked for him.

I thought greg was dead!  Is greg alive, greg?

I'm feeling much better.

Glad you have a solution in place. It could have been much worse. You could have had the schmeckles. 
 

So, while watching the Windows Recovery Console progress bar advance, I failed to note what it read below it:
"You need to install a 3rd-party SCSI or RAID driver".
I'll google that, but answers here will probably make more sense to me.