The drive was found to be the culprit. The platter is still spinning, but for some reason cannot be read from or written to.

Alas! They said they cannot do the repair under AppleCare unless they install whatever Apple sends them. If they installed another drive for me, they'd have to charge $80 because it would have to be done outside of AppleCare. So, I guess I'll be getting another refurbished Maxtor. At least that is what it will have when I get it home. When it comes out from under AppleCare on December 28th, I'll see how difficult it is to replace the drive myself and then put in that IBM/Hitatchi that Trevor directed me to above. Then, maybe I'll get an external enclosure and get an external drive out of the affair.

Thanks for your assistance.

Following the instructions on this page I installed the new drive (the one Trevor suggested) today. It wasn't hard at all, and with the magnetized philips screwdriver (suggested by another poster here) it did not feel too risky either.

I just had one mishap. Someone came in and interrupted me about halfway through. Finally they left and I installed the drive, put everything back together and turned it on. I got out the Panther installation disk so I could pop it in to set up the fresh drive when the gray apple showed up and then my desktop came up. I can't believe I re-installed my old drive. Anyway, I went through it all again and although it was harder to be careful the second time, I got the new one installed without any further mishaps.

I also bought a 512 MB DIMM to raise me to 768 MB (from 512 MB). Between the two of them, it is feeling a lot more spry tonight. Yeah, I know that the bill was about 1/3 the cost of a Mac Mini, but this machine is still quite usable for me.

Thank you for all your help.