Hard drive kaput?

[Ollie Acheson <oacheson@acheson.org>]

Got back from a trip only to find my webserver largely dead. When I 
tried to reboot with knoppix, first the bios noted problems with the 
hard drive. Knoppix eventually started, but when I tried to mount the 
hard drive, I got a lengthy cycle of error messages of the form:

hda: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: read_intr: error=0x01 {AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=86579028, sector=2

until eventually it mounted the partition (worked with 3 of the 5 
partitions -- two wouldn't ever mount).

While it seems pretty apparent that the hard drive is toast, I would 
appreciate understanding the error messages. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Ollie