Ok, I have 4 ide channels: 20gb, 80gb, 160gb, dvd+/-rw. I started playing some tunes off of the 80gb drive (formatted in XFS), and after about 5 minutes into listening, the music just stopped. I then tried browsing the drive for another music file to see if it was the file, and I noticed all my symlinks were broken, then I noticed nothing at all was accessible on the 80gb drive. So, I panicked and rebooted. When I rebooted, my BIOS told me that the drive configuration had changed and my 80gb was missing. It then rebooted automatically to accept the drive changes and the 80 gig was back after the BIOS rebooted. However, when linux started up mount gave the infamous error of a bad filesystem type. I checked fdisk, and it my partition was now labeled as ext2. So just for a test I tried passing -t ext2 to no avail. THen, (maybe I shouldnt have done this but I didnt know what else to do), I rewrote the XFS header to the partition with mkfs.xfs, and my drive is once again XFS, but without any data. My question is WTF happened? ...and is it possible to use some type of tool to recover as much data as possible? I know XFS has problems with power failures, but I think this is hardly the case. Is it bad hardware, or did linux screw me over? There are 0 bad sectors. Thank you for any help in advance.

You could scan /var/log/messages for the time of the failure for more info.

S.M.A.R.T. drives keep some history. You could look for temperatures or other info.

Is the drive too hot to touch? Maybe a case fan has failed.

Step one with any suspected hard drive problems is to download the manufacturer's utility disk and do a full check.