Unfsckable

I was peacefully running a fairly stock black slab with 3.0 (no kernel servers, in particular) when my external 1.2GB drive flamed out sort of like Mark described, only more so: scores of media errors and bad sectors, crashes, kernel panics, etc. This built up gradually over about 5 days until my system was totally unbootable, unfsckable, and unusable.

Source: wiktionary

I'm a fan of SCSI hard drives, and I like to set up ext3 with an external journal, ie.^([sic]) on a different physical drive, which speeds things up a bit, though at the cost of making your data twice as vulnerable to hard drive failures (if the journal drive dies you're likely to end up with an unfsckable mess on the data drive).

Source: wiktionary

Linux file system hopelessly corrupted and unfsckable. Despaired of losing all the data accumulated since the last CD backup, but then remembered an old Knoppix CD in the drawer. It detected all the partitions on the hdd, plus my USB stick, enabling a retrieve of my precious data.

Source: wiktionary