Disk Death

[Kurt Wall]

There I was, happily computing along and downloading a torrent of the 
Fedora 11 alpha when the following occurred:

1) The torrent window abruptly closed
2) My xterms all showed the message from syslogd: "ext3: journal commit 
error"
3) My browser died.
4) Simple "ls" and "/bin/ls" commands in the xterms got "I/O errors"

I exited X and tried to login at the console but the machine would 
accept only my user name. Before getting the password prompt the screen 
would clear, reset, and I'd be back at the Login: prompt. 

Unable to get a console session, I tried to Ctl-Alt-Del to restart. No 
love. After a few attempts at that, I gave up and power-cycled the 
machine. While doing so, I noticed that the drive light for this drive 
was solid on - it usually only flickers a little bit when being 
accessed.

Upon reboot, the system couldn't even detect the drive that was giving 
me grief. Even a probe from the BIOS screen failed. I'm thinking it's 
toast.

Grmph.