I would 'guess' it was the hard drive as well. You have a few options and the radio is expensive to just throw away. Some people have been working towards successful replacement of these hard drives.
On the charger forums, one guy has laid out how to do a HD to HD copy which 'might' work with yours if your hard drive is not completely fried.
Another option would be to 'borrow' the hard drive out of the same make/model radio and do a disk to disk copy to a new hard drive. All of these processes are technically doable but fairly complicated.
Check out this thread:
http://www.chargerforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109886
Also search around google or the search engine of your choice for mygig hard drive replacement. You might be able to find some info.
There are talks of people replacing the traditional standard laptop-like drive with an SSD drive which would be more shock resistant for offroad too.
Oh and I'm in NC too and have been doing computer forensic and data storage for a few years, I can probably point you in the right direction if one of your tech friends can't do it for you.
I tend to work for beer... :cheers2:
Looks like there is at least one company that will sell a replacement for around 200-250 bucks too... oemautopartsco dot com...
For a price of a new radio vs. Either a lot of time on your part doing it yourself, paying for a new swap out and re-ripping your music, it doesn't look too bad.
