[OT] Hard Drive shutdown

[David <dbree@duo-county.com>]

I  know  this is not Debian specific, but I'm curious..

Yesterday, my HD shut down briefly rather unexplainably to me.

I was doing and aptitude update.  Suddenly, I heard something that
sounded like the HD shutting off and spinnign down. The HD light
normally flickers during HD operation, and looking at the light, it was
flickering apparently normally.

I was in X, and it appeared that nothing was responding.  I tried
CTRL-ALT-F1 and nothing seemed to happen at the moment.  Suddenly the HD
spun back up, I went into Console mode, etc..

Later, I noticed that at least one file was corrupted,
/var/lib/dpkg/info/openoffice.org-l10-en.list.  It was not complete; I
removed and reinstalled the whole openoffice.org suite.

I have the following entry in my kern.log (as well as corresponding
entries in other logs):

------------------ cut -----------------
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: hda: status timeout: status=0x80 {
Busy }
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: 
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: hda: DMA disabled
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: hda: drive not ready for command
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: ide0: reset timed-out, status=0x80
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: hda: status timeout: status=0x80 {
Busy }
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: 
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: hda: drive not ready for command
Jul 28 15:25:41 localhost kernel: ide0: reset: success

----------------- cut ------------------

This shows everything happening within a minute - it seemed like a log
longer.  But I just wonder what is going on.  Could it be the HD wanting
to fail?  It's a WD-400BB maybe a couple years old.  Could it be the
BIOS trying to put the HD to sleep?  Don't think I had that set - will
check upon next reboot.  Overheating?  The system had not been up over a
half hour.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.