Following the instructions, I did put in the start up disk and it doesn't even recognize that there is a hard drive. I cannot hear the hard drive "thinking" and "spinning." There is no noise other than when I put the start up disk in the optical drive.

DD16 was using the computer and it said there was an update so she clicked on update and that is when it crashed. Although we are using Tiger, there was an update sent out yesterday afternoon for Leopard according to the tech guy. After he told me that (and I should have asked) I wonder if somehow it tried to update Leopard on the Tiger which caused it to crash. This all happened around the time the Leopard update was put out yesterday afternoon.