[NCLUG] Hard disk failure

[BluKnight]

> Any thoughts about what might have gone wrong?  Do I have any hope for
> recovery?

Have you tried booting with your rescue disk, and doing a recover using the 
backup superblock?  (fsck -b 8193 /dev/whatever) 

It's possible your master superblock bit the big one...  You may be able to 
recover from a backup (the above line assumes you used some default 
configs, it should work in 99% of the cases I come across)

--mec