devastating 5.0R crash

[Paul A. Mayer]

Hmmmm. I think that my 5.0R installation has self destructed.

Background:
* 60GB toshiba disk with two active OS partitions (win2k, freebsd) booted with ranish
* Freebsd partition has 4 slices, swap (ca. 2GB), root (250MB), var (250MB), usr (ca. 6GB), other msdosfs partitions are occassionally mounted.
* Kernel is 5.0 release p1, updated about 3-4 days ago (don't recall exactly but I did notice some updates to ffs.) Loads ko's for acpi, radeon, linux, sound support, and one or two other things I don't recall right now.
* Hardware is Asus L3800, (i845-based p4 mobile w/ 1GB RAM). Has otherwise run great with 5.0R (there were acpi problems with RC* version, which have disappeared). The machine is new; it has about 8 weeks of running time.
* Running configuration is strictly desktop. Not serving anything, not developing anything, not running a db app or similar.
* After a normal shutdown in the evening, the machine rebooted normally in the morning. I logged on to my user account and start X (running gnome2). I checked mail in moz 1.2.1. I go to open phoenix and nothing happens. I was called away to look at something. When I return to my machine it's in the process of rebooting. It has hard reset itself for some reason and is stumbling through the tail end of the boot up sequence and goes into lock, clearly not able to read some thing in /etc like ttys (gives a blank shell type prompt, where I have my console set to secure.)

Status:
I'm presently running fsck_ffs from a live cd. It fsck'ed / with some complaints about an unreadable sector. It's now on /var and reporting vast, vast numbers of sectors as unreadable, with "UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY". I've not visited /usr yet. I hope my disk (with less than 800 hours of service) hasn't been somehow physically borked. (The windows partition boots and runs seemingly fine.)

Any ideas? Any guesses about what caused a hard reset (loading phoenix)? How to gaurd against this in the future? (Besides don't run 5.0R! ;-) ... I'm just hoping to be able to get /usr/home/(user) off, I'm assume the installation is utterly trashed.)

/Paul


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