Partitions Dissapeared

[n2ize]

I got a call from a family member running Fedora 12 on a Dell Inspiron B130 laptop using a Broadcomm Wireless card. Everything was working beautiful for well over 2 years until a day or two ago. First any and all networking has vanished. The OS doesn't even recognize that there is a wired or wireless NIC in there,
At the same exact time, other problems arose. Namely, a couple of partitions dissapeared... They show up if I do a "fdisk -l" but that mught just be reading /etc/fstab.

I tried to run a file system check on the two missing partitions, /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda7. When I try and run a check on /dev/sda7 I get "fsck.swap not found.. Error 2 while executin fsck.swap for /dev/sda7".

Any ideas ? Failing drive maybe ?

[W3WN]

Please tell me that they have made a recent backup of their critical data.

One of two things comes to mind... Disk controller failed. Hard drive failed.

[n2ize]

Please tell me that they have made a recent backup of their critical data.

One of two things comes to mind... Disk controller failed. Hard drive failed.
Not too big a problem. The /home directories, where most personal and irreplaceable data is stored are fine. What may be missing are coinfiguration images, which can be replaced.

[W4GPL]

fdisk doesn't read fstab at all, so that's not what I'd consider.

[n2ize]

fdisk doesn't read fstab at all, so that's not what I'd consider.
OK, Good to know. Seems like it may be a disk issue. I'll run some disk diags. Might be as good a time as any to install a new drive and update to the latest and the greatest,.

[W4GPL]

Does smartctl show any errors?

[n2ize]

Does smartctl show any errors?

Not sure yet. Next chance I get to access the system I'll have a look.