Philip Stubbs wrote:
> Can anybody tell from this meagre description what may have gone wrong?
Sounds very much like some part of your hard-drive internal electronics
have degraded.
> Alternatively, does anybody have any suggestions on some trouble
> shooting suggestions I can try tonight when I get in?
Boot the machine then check for messages including "failed opcode errors
on boot, drive seek, seek complete"
I would then try to boot from another disk with a test installation of
Linux and see if the performance is normal.
Moving on, if the performance of your test installation is normal, then
you want to rescue the data from your old bad disk as soon as you can;
Create partitions roughly matching those, in size and type, of your Linux
installation then set a new disk as slave, assuming your old disk is
master. Boot into a live cd or rescue environment the use cp -ar to move
the data from your old disk to the new disk. There are a number of ways to
rescue your data but this is one of the simplest. (don't use dd unless you
have a few hours to spare). Then swap disks. You may need to re-create
your MBR.
Damian
--
Damian L Brasher
http://www.diap.org.uk
