I was using my Fedora 8 desktop system normally, and suddenly the entire system stopped responding (not just X - the entire system was totally frozen). I reset the computer and now it stops during the boot process at "Mounting Local Filesystems: ". There's a flashing cursor at the end of the line as well.

Right now I will try booting into recovery mode and fsck-ing the disks. Has anyone else had this problem or does anyone have any advice? Help is greatly appreciated.

I wasn't able to boot to recovery mode, either - the same problem occurred. However, I began fscking each partition with a Parted Magic liveCD (a *really* useful tool BTW) and it has frozen as well. I'm not sure which drive caused it because I was checking multiple drives at once.

The original freeze happened while I was running some disk-intensive tasks on a disk which I just installed in my system, and now I'm thinking that for some reason, accessing a certain area on that disk causes the system to freeze.

Is this possible? The Parted Magic CD runs kernel 2.6.24.something and my Fedora system is 2.6.25.something. Shouldn't the system fail more gracefully than this?

Just a follow-up: it turns out that one of my hard drives apparently died - removing it fixed the computer. It's interesting to me that its death locked up the system entirely; it must have *really* messed up something on a low level.