I forget where I was when it happened, but my opensuse 13.1 system froze, not the typical, application froze or the rarer X froze, but the froze type of froze. So, I powered my laptop down and tried unsuccefully to bring it back.
I'm no newbie in Linux, though I don't consider myself an expert yet, and so I started trouble shooting on my own. I brught up the system with a knoppix dvd and discovered that I could not access the drive. I have a few trouble shooting tools on a cd so I tried those, but they all reported drive not ready (I says it in /var/log/warn under kernel)(I forget the exact error code, probably -16.) I researched this problem and found that it typically ment that there was something wrong with the motherboard.
My desktop system was broken (the motherboard) at the time so I whiled away a week or more and then tried it in the new system only to find the same error greating me. I tried accessing it with opensuse and knoppix on the desktop to no avail. I know that there is something wrong with the laptops motherboard because, as I said, I whiled away a week with a dvd on the laptop and I kept getting these really wierd problems.
Now I was editing a file in either kwrite or nano when the system froze and I was not doing anything different during that day. As it was a laptop system I brought it up and down frequently and I had booted it that morning. I had the SMART tech enabled in the bios and I recived no warning, which is strange. There was no electrical storms when the laptop froze and I was running on AC power. Again, I can't access the drive, for any purpose; even to get the SMART data.
The drive spins up, I can hear it by putting my ear close. I tried changing cabels, both power and SATA cabel to no avail. The drive is not more then 6 months old, it comes from a Gateway NV570P09u. I know that this all points to hardware failure, but as my desktop was down I had to use the laptop for a while and it accumulated a buch of important data. I have a warrenty which I don't want to void so please don't suggest opening the drive itself (not that someone would be dumb enough to suggest that but you never know.) The broken drive is a 750 GiB and is western digital.
If I missed anything, just yell, I've written all I can think of. As I said, I'm no newbie so you can ask technical questions.

First thing you should try is run memtest86+ from the knoppix dvd. Let it run for at least a full pass.

Also, in the future, please try to write multiple paragraphs instead of one large wall of text. If I lose my place, I have to search through the wall of text, which is hard.

I tried memtest86+ version 3.5a nothing 1 and 1/2 passes. I'll try again if you'd like. The type of problems I'm experencing are the inability to access the cd drive, the inability to access a wireless network, and messages indicating that "look" or simmilar can't be executed because it's a binary file.
I fixed the paragraph problem, sorry, I should have thought of that.

Well, two different computers one HDD, it's very likely the HDD is broken.

Is it detected by either system ? If so can you post the output of 'smartctl -a /dev/sda' assuming '/dev/sda' is the HDD you want more info on.

If it is not detected, it is dead for sure.

It may be possible to access the data with testdisk or photorec when the drive is placed in a usb to sata adapter.

When a system is going bad it may be that the data will fail or even the drive will go with the rest of the system.

Sometimes smart tools or the OEM hard drive company has tools to diag the drive.

I'll check if the company has a tool to diagnose the drive, however the drive is detected, but fails to respond (drive not ready,) to both computers. I still find it amazing that a drive would fail with out warning though, has anyone ever heard of this? I noticed that the linux kernel says that a "soft reset" failed, is there a way to force a reset?
I received a message from my desktop (the working one,) that jogged my memory, I don't know if this is important or not, I got a message from rkhunter among the messages, was:
My laptop gave me similar messages shortly before it's demise, the desktop has never been connected to the Internet,and the only exe I've run without it coming from an rpm is tremulous, but it never gave me this type of message ever before. Using knoppix I've sha512ed the file I then (using knoppix) downloaded and verified the rpm that holds whatis and I then sha512ed the new copy and compared it to the one whose inode changed, they are identical, so why did it move?
Anyways, I got the same message from the laptop before it failed and there were several affected files, I don't remember them all but postfix and postgresql were affected, I noticed them particularly because they had a similar name but were from different packages. I verified them using rpm and they were ok (I figured that rpm must be ok because rkhunter did not report it as bad and if someone replaced rkhunter it would not have reported the other files but missed rpm.)
I, also had planned to verify the system using aide (I had a database,) but that week and a half was a busy one and the day I was going to do it was the day it crashed.
I backed up the data on my desktop, so that if the inode change is a sign of failure, currently the drive's smart values are ok, I will not lose anything.

HDDs can fail without warning, not even from SMART. You must backup your data, this is the only way to prevent losing it. This applies to SSDs too.

Running SMART long tests once in a while and monitoring attributes is a good idea as it can give you a hint if the drive is starting to fail. There is no guarantee that the drive will not fail without warning.