[OT] my hard drive was murdered!

[volvoguy]

Hi group. I have sad news this time. It may not be Ubuntu related, but
since Ubuntu was running at the time, I want to throw the issue out
there and see if the collective knowledge on the list here can help me
out.

I leave my computer on 24/7. The whole machine is only about 2 months
older than Ubuntu itself, so I know the hardware wasn't nearing the
end of it's life. When I got up this morning, I thought it was odd
that my screensaver wasn't running - but I jiggled the mouse and was
prompted for my password (as I set it to do). After several tries with
the correct password, I knew something was wrong. I tried switching to
one of the other consoles and all of them were repeating this error
over and over:

EXT-fs error (device hda3) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted

Yikes. I've never seen that before. I did a hard reboot (the only
thing left to do) and my BIOS recognizes my primary hard drive (on
which hda3 has Ubuntu installed), but when it attempts to boot, I get
the dreaded "no operating system found. press any key to reboot". The
only "live" cd I had around was "slax" (a slackware derrivative), so I
booted with that and it found my second HD (a SATA drive) during
bootup, but it didn't automatically mount the first hard drive (an
IDE/ATA 133 drive), nor could I manually mount it. (error was
something to the effect of "/dev/hda doesn't exist" or "bad superblock
or too many mounted filesystems"). I've tried booting with a Norton
Systemworks disc and a Western Digital data lifeguard recovery  disc -
neither of which do much of anything. My next test is to see if the
Windows XP disc recognizes the drive. I've never had the problem where
the BIOS sees the drive, but can't boot from it.

While I'm almost positive Ubuntu didn't have anything to do with this,
can anybody offer some more troubleshooting suggestions? (off list if
this is deemed off-topic) I'm at my wits end. :(


-- 
Aaron

Ubuntu SVG Artwork - www.volvoguy.net/ubuntu
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