How do I figure out if my hdd is broken or what else happened

Question

Hi there,
last thursday I turned on my computer, started k3b to burn a data dvd (on a dvd+rw), started kaffeine to watch tv (dvb-t) while the dvd was being burned and I ran pacman -Syu.
Then kaffeine was behaving weirdly, it was only playing tv for a few seconds and then the picture and sound was gone, then I saw that the cpu usage on one core was pretty much contuniously up at 100percent. k3b did not respond either (and it wasn't drawn on the screen correctly anymore either, it was only a solid grey box). When I checked what pacman was doing I realized that pacman had aborted itself because it couldn't remove the db.lck. So I wanted to remove it, but 'rm -i /var/lib/pacman/db.lck' as root returned, that /var was mounted as read only. After that the computer became completely unusable, I wasn't able to run any command, not even 'halt' worked so I had to turn my computer off by pulling the cord basically.
What the hell was going on with my computer there? I'm running arch on my computer for a couple of years now, I didn't change anything recently, though it's been years since the last time I burned a cd/dvd. Thinking back I believe I heard my hdd spin down at some point.
Anyhow, tomorrow I'll go back home (last thursday when all that happened I just wanted to burn that dvd real quick before I left for vacation over new years), but what should I do? Should I boot from a different medium and try to see if sdparm reports any errors for that drive? That would mean, the hdd would be powered up for a few minutes because hdds can't be hotplugged (or can they?). In case there would be something wrong with my hdd, can that already have negative effects (ie destroy data)?
Alright, how do I proceed? If you need any more information, let me know.

Answer 1

Alright, thanks for the replies. I booted a live cd, ran smartctl on my hdd and because it passed the overall-health self-assessment I mounted my /var partition and copied /var/log onto a flash drive. Here's my errors.log, these ata messages were the only entries I could find in all my logfiles that look like error message: http://pastebin.ca/2037703
Does that mean the kernel lost connection to the hdd?
How do I narrow it down to either a hardware or software issue that caused this? I mean, smartmontools tell me the hdd is working fine (those 'pre-fail's sound scary, but the values are pretty far away from the threshold, so I guess it's fine) but I don't want to just plug my hdd back in, boot from it and see what happens. I'd like to know what caused this.
Well here's what smartctl -a said to my hdd: http://pastebin.ca/2037720
Here's /var/log/everything.log: http://no-paste.ch/index.php?show=187
Let me know if you need more information.
Last edited by hybrid (2011-01-03 19:00:38)