Bleh. Came home to find myself off IRC, checking the machine and it gives connection refused on ssh. Going over to my ICQ messages i find a note about it hanging when creating a directory. uh-oh.
I went down and sat down. And yeah, main filesystem was fubar. as was /boot. Whats worse, IDE errors. dammit. disk corrupt, no cdrom and the only kernel that works is a grsecurity "deny most things".. including chown, chmod, mount and everything else inside a chroot.
I spent about an hour scratching my head and trying to get around my own restrictions (the other kernels around didn't boot due to corrupted sectors. Egh.) Finally did get around it (remounting / to another partition.. nasty pivot). Reinstall on another place and hope for the best. This time, the system is on the latter half of the disk. Might hold out for a week or so until I get another disk.
I hate hardware.