No-longer Mountable External Hard Drive

[Euralis]

Hey tuxies, i need some help: not a newb problem either I think.


Background
Today i have been encountering some pretty disturbing problems with my FC11 system. All of it started out when my computer locked up while I was playing a game of freecol. After I restarted the computer i started getting messages saying there was a "kernel loop" or some such error. Anyway, I have been noticing some instabilities in other areas of the OS, like in VLC and the media players (no longer play .wmv files and have been changing skins without direction). The result of this is that I decided I was going to blow away my fricking hard drive, and i wanted to transfer all the files out onto my terra-byte external. So i plug this thing in and start transferring the files and guess what... the computer locks up....twice. Okay, so no big deal right... wrong! apparently after the second time it broke something in my computer. So now, i need to get stuff off of a failing hard disk, and have no way of doing so; getting that stuff off is my only concern now. This is the message I get.

The Error

$MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0). Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Input/output error NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g. /dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation for more details. .

My Questions

1. How do I make this hard disk mountable again?
2. Why did this happen?
3. Why do computers usually die like this?
4. --any other things pertinant to the situation are welcome

Well, lets get this show on the road! And BTW, another problem with this computer is I cant burn DVD's because of some software error. If u want me to post more about that, let me know.

Thanks Guys,
Euralis

[Rubberman]

This is a hardware problem, not a software one. Either your system board is going belly up, or your system drive is. Boot from a live/rescue CD/DVD and see if you can run fsck on your root file systems (/dev/sda1...). It will either fail because the system board is failing, or it will tell you your hard drive is going. Use the -c (lower-case 'c') to check for bad blocks.