I have a netbook with a 150GB hard drive in it. A while ago I dropped my netbook and it wouldn't boot. Had a "failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED" error at startup. So naturally I went and reinstalled. Reinstalling worked fine and I had my computer back. What I didn't account for was the fact that anytime it lost power and didn't shut down properly, I'd get the same error. I can't seem to recover my data either. Can't get any live disks to mount the hard drive after this error but for some reason I can still reinstall Crunchbang (essentially debian). Now I know there are bad sectors or something because when I try to use the disk that came with the netbook with an image of Windows XP that writes to the entire hard drive it throws an error but linux will avoid this I suppose when installing.
Now all of this is to say, being a laptop, several times I have left it on overnight when I fall asleep working or have to run into to town and it'll die and then I lose all my data, rather irritating. What's causing this error? What can I do to prevent it besides getting a new hard drive? If I can't prevent it from happening in the future is there a way to recover the data off the hard drive? Here's the section of the boot log that contains the error: http://pastebin.com/MPqEgZ1j

Sorry if this is a long post, just wanted to fully explain everything, and thanks for any help provided.

Since the error is occurring after you dropped the netbook, it can be the harddisk, the connectors or a broken circuit board. At first I would have a look if the connectors aren't loose. If they aren't you can test the disk in a different PC. If it is working in a different machine I would assume that you broke your netbook, otherwise it will be the harddisk.

If you haven't overwritten your data already with reinstalling your OS or the failed attempt to install Windows, there may be a chance that you can recover your data. If it really is important/valuable data you should contact a professional company for that, otherwise you can try it with a live-cd with testdisk/photorec installed.

One thing I would check is if the drive is snug in the connector. Maybe you just have an intermittent loose connection.

Try to print out the partition table first chance you get. Knowing where partitions start, you can use losetup to create a loop device starting at the beginning of the filesystem for each partition, and then mount the loop device. This will work for a drive that has a damaged partition table. Get the data backed up as soon as possible. You don't have an alternative then replacing the drive if it isn't a loose connection. The drive has been damaged and possibly, it will not be able to read any part of the drive soon.

losetup /dev/loop5 /dev/sda -o $((start_sector*512))

Thanks for the quick response!
I do plan on testing it in another machine as soon as I get a chance (probably not until monday though).

Sadly in my area there isn't much in the way of professional companies to handle this sort of thing. I just successfully booted into crunchbang of the live disk and will try to one of those programs and see what I can do. Most of the data isn't that important but there are a few files that I didn't backup yet as they were being worked on when the machine died this time :/ but hopefully I can get it back.

Okay, I'll try that right now jschiwal. Looks pretty simple to do as well. How would I print out the partition table though?

[edit]
I did manage to recover my files with testdisk. Was really easy actually. Now that that's all solved, out of curiosity, are there any ways to repair a disk or the current install on it? This is probably the 3rd or 4th time this has happened and my best guess is that something in settings mess up as the files are obviously still there, just somethings preventing it from booting. Is there a way to fix this error without reinstalling yet again?
[/edit]

You could run badblocks to check for bad blocks on the disk. You probably should make a full backup. At least of your /home directory or partition. Backing up /home, reformatting (with fsck -c to run badblocks) and restoring /home may be the best bet.

Since you dropped the drive, I would strongly recommend you replace the drive. It has damage on the surface and it will get worse.

You could run Steve Gibson's spinrite on the disk and then if you can mount the partitions, copy the contents to a new disk.
spinrite isn't free, but it may be able to recover some of the information from bad blocks, and at least swap out bad blocks with good ones.
I use it at work to check drives in devices we have. If there are a large number of bad blocks, I chuck the disk. Only a couple, I can let spinrite finish and reuse it. In my case, I unpartition the drive first. I don't care about files, just the condition of the disk.

For a filesystem error, you can run fsck on the partitions.