server went unbootable

[Dale Amon]

Did a whole bunch of 'Precise' updates that showed up today
and on reboot the server is continuously printing:

Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0
end_request I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0

It comes up to where I can get an ssh session after about 
a half hour. (1)

Has anyone else gotten bit this way? Is there any
general advice for things that might be a work around?

I'm going hunting but I have no idea what I am looking
for yet...

1 A pet peeve of mine: a long time ago when I
  hand rolled critical systems out of linux, I had ssh come
  up almost before anything else. I consider it a bug that
  it is delayed so long in the boot process, as do some
  other hard core sys admins I know...