I think I have destroyed my hard drive. Neither Windows nor Linux will boot. I was working on my landscape engine, and I incorrectly ended up doing a whole lot of reads at the end of a file. This is using just plain old read() calls. Harmless, right? Except that immediatly my computer started acting strange, really slow, etc. I tried killing my landscape engine, but it was long since killed. I tried killing Anjuta, same problem. I tried logging out of X but it was frozen. Finally CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE got me to the console and I saw lots of wierd Reiser error messages slowly scrolling up the screen. I tried everything I could think of to kill everything, but soon even the console itself wasn't responding. I hit the reset button and Grub came up, but it sat there, and after a couple seconds it said "Error 18". I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and tried again. This time the menu came up and I clicked Linux. It started booting, although slowly, and eventually I got a kernel panic. I rebooted again and tried Windows. All I got was a black screen. I'm guessing that means that my hard drive is corrupted? That's pretty rough. My most important stuff I backed up a couple months ago and hasn't really changed since, but still, WHAT was I doing that caused that to happen? WHAT was so catastrophic that it caused the Linux AND Windows (or at least the MBR) partitions to die? I'm going to try to run some tests on the hard drive to see if it died, but the hard drive is only maybe 7 or 8 months old.

It's almost impossible that a couple of read() calls triggered that. In fact, this sounds much more like a hardware failure, maybe a headcrash. Try to run a surface analyzer over your HDD, that will most probably show the real origin of the problem.

Oh yeah, and if you have important data on the drive, then boot from a CD based distro, mount the drive, and try to copy as much as possible to a different drive. Although in your case, it sounds if it is already to late for that, unfortunately.

I ran the WD diagnostic thingy and the hard drive is definitely dead. I ran the quick test first and after about 8 seconds it said something about a read error and suggested a full media test. I started it and after about 8 hours I checked it again and it seemed to have stalled out about 25% of the way through the test, plus I noticed a small metalic WHIIIIIIIIEEEE sound coming from the computer. Another 8 hours later it was still stalled on the same spot so I aborted the test.

Good thing it's still under warrantee. In a wierd way I'm relieved it was the hard drive and not Linux suddenly deciding to eat my HD.

I'm having a bad day.

I burned a copy of Gnoppix and booted with it so I'd at least get some functionality out of my computer. It worked, but then when I logged out of Gnome it decided to completely reboot the computer. When it tried to boot again X wouldn't start, saying no screens found. In fact, ever since then when it's tried to boot it can't start X.

That doesn't make sense to me. The Gnoppix that's booting each time is exactly the same, since nothing at all is being permenantly written to anything, so why isn't it working? And is there ANY way to get Gnoppix to start without having to use X? As soon as it detects that X isn't working it just restarts the machine.

Just a thought (about the X errors) but I had exactly the same sort of errors cropping up intermittently when I had a faulty video card. Sometimes it would start X, sometimes it wouldn't.

You didn't inadvertently electrocute your computer did you? Tis the season to be static-y, and it almost sounds like you've got multiple hardware failures in there. [grin]