[OT] kernel panic; I/O error -- hardware failure?

[nori heikkinen <nori@sccs.swarthmore.edu>]

hey all,

friday afternoon, my computer suddenly went offline and became
un-ping-able.  upon getting home and checking it out, i saw it wasn't
responding to any keyboard or mouse input.  i hard-rebooted it, and it
kernel panicked.  i can't get it to boot up at all.

so i popped in a Knoppix CD, thinking i'd just fsck everything, and
reboot.  no such luck -- after fscking all the partitions, i still got a
kernel panic!

but, while i'm in Knoppix, i'm noticing strange behavior.  once, while
booting into knoppix, i got this error:

Accessing KNOPPIX CDROM at /dev/scd1 ... /modules/cloop.o: init_module:
Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorret module parameters
including invalid IO or IRQ parameters
Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.

At this point, of course, i couldn't boot.

but it doesn't always happen like this!  sometimes, it boots in to
knoppix just fine.  but then i notice errors when i'm working within it.
like, sometimes the console just spits out line after line of this (the
following from when i was trying to use knoppix's `mv`):

scsi: ERROR on channel 0, id 1, lun 0, CDB: Request Sense 00 00 00 40 00
Current sd0b:01: sense key Medium Error
Additional sense indicates Random positioning error
  I/O error: dev 0b:01, sector 97344
cloop: Read error at pos 48243807 in file /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX, 28800
bytes lost.
cloop: error -3 uncompressing block 2479 65536/0/28800/[more nummbers]
end_request: I/O error, dev f0:00 (cloop), sector [number]
bash: /bin/mv: Input/output error

i've never seen this under knoppix before.  is it indicative, at all, of
what's going with my computer refusing to boot?  i feel like it must be
related.

my data appears to be all intact on my hard drives.

i took apart everything and re-seated all the IDE and power connections.
now it won't even boot enough to kernel panic on its own, and i can't
tell if that's my fault or not -- i didn't not plug anything back in
that i unplugged, so i'm a bit confused.  i'll try taking it apart
again.

basically, i'm wondering if anyone has a better sense than i do from
these errors what's going on here.  cloop?  i/o error?  what kind of
failure does this indicate?

thanks a lot,

</nori>

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