BUGGER
Looks like my server that is coloed out in New Westminster is having problems. Specifically, the primary master hard drive isn't coming up. It disappeared for no reason mid-afternoon, and never came back. I sent off an email to a guy I know who works there asking if he could take a look at it. I've had problems before, but they were either connectivity (DDOS) and self induced (ever typed "ifconfig eth0 down" on a remote server? It's a bad idea).
I recently replaced the /home partition on this system. Just after I did that the MBR got messed up, so I had similar problems, and if I'm really lucky, it's something like that again. Maybe a bad power cable or connection that needs wiggling. It's just a huge pain in the ass because it's an hour drive (in non rush hour traffic) to get from work in Chilliwack to the colo). And of course this has to happen on a friday, which means I have to beg the sysadmin there to come in over the weekend to let me into the machine room.
I really hope that the drive is not shot... it wouldn't be a disaster, I have backups of the vital parts (/etc, database dumps) and /var, /usr, and /home are all separate partitions, so (hopefully) it's recoverable. If the drive itself is shot, it's a matter of trying to figure out which partitions were mounted from the primary drive and which were on the secondary. I know (at least 99.99% sure) that /home is fine, as it's a SCSI drive that is brand new. It's just that on boot /dev/hda is not detected.
Fingers crossed.