P4 running Ubuntu 8.10 with 4 physical disks, no RAID. One of the non-system disks, /dev/sda with ext2 (I think, it was from an old system that I mounted), is giving me read errors while extracting some rars. Unmounted disk, run fsck -c /dev/sda which takes all night. Decide to kill the fsck process this morning as when I first started it, it had said "read-only test" so I (wrongly?) assumed that it wasn't actually writing anything, probably a bad idea, but seemed brilliant in my uncaffeinated state when I got up. :/

Anyways, rebooted system, chokes on "Alert! /dev/by-uuid/some-guid-to-bad-drive" error, so was hoping to be able to get into a shell where I could edit fstab and comment out the bad drive so I could boot up system and continue trying to fix/recover the disk. However, I can't seem to get anywhere off of any live cd.

With Rescue Remix, it gets to the options menu (memtest, enter to boot, etc.), hit enter, SRST failed (errno -16), continues, then get buffer I/O error, end request, etc. for sr0, which I believe is the bad drive.

bad controller? Kind of clueless as how to proceed. Hoping to salvage as much data as I can, as I have another equivalent-sized drive mounted/available to copy the data to.