Thanks for your attempt at helping me on Friday, Demo.
The way that my hard drive died was kind of strange. Here's how it went.
Random shut downs for a couple of days prior to the eventual death.
Then, failure to boot into windows. Every time I tried, it would get to the splash screen with the little progress bar thingee and then it would just shut down.
Still, it booted into Linux just fine.
Linux was unable to mount the NTFS partition, though.
I put in a Windows disk and tried to repair the installation not realizing at that point that it was a drive failure in progress. Unfortunately, the install program was unable to recognize the existing install so there was no repair option. I ran bootcfg with the relevant options without success and then I ran chkdsk. I was informed at that time that I had one or more sectors that were damaged and unrecoverable. Meh.
After I took out the install disk, the system failed to even find GRUB to allow me to select Linux.
I tossed in the Debain disk to see what it would find when it looked at the partitions. It found no logical drives. Double Meh.
Now, I've got to call Seagate and see about replacing this drive that is less than one year old. And, to think... I switched to Seagate because Western Digital pissed me off with 3 drives in a row.