Uhg, this morning I go to login to my puter with GDM saying the filesystem is read-only and can't login, or something to that extent. I hit the reboot button on my case. When GRUB starts up, my hard drive shuts itself off, with a sort of hissing sound. After a bit it comes back on, continuing to load GRUB. Everything starts to load then my hard drive shuts down again, with some hda_timeout_error messages, and a bunch of numbers.

Long story short, I think my hard drive is done for. A brand new WD 200Gb drive. I think what happend is that recently, my xserver was updated (apt-get) and since then has crashed A LOT, forcing me to hit the reboot button. I'm sure my hdd didn't like that. I'm guessing there is a bad sector on my drive and when it hits the sector, that's when it shuts down and makes the hissing noise.

I'm guess that I'm screwed, I can't even boot to a command prompt to back up my data. Stupid me. I had everything set up just the way I wanted it. Horray for spending more money that I don't have on another hard drive.

OK seriously, this sucks. I just tried booting from Knoppix to try and get my files. Great idea, right? Well, I tried mounting the drive with no luck. hda not a valid block device, or something. Same with hda1. Not a good time for this to happen either. I have assignments to finish so that I can freakin graduate!! UGH.