[PLUG] Desktop failure returned

[Denis Heidtmann]

After upgrading to Grub2 on the 13th the hope was that would fix things.
Not so.

This time the failure happened after it was running for 5-10 minutes, not
on boot.  First symptoms were Chrome failed to start 3 times.  Then
Nautilus did not display properly; it closed when I attempted to view the
root directory.  Then the desktop icons were big and spurious text
appeared.  ^ alt bksp yielded:
*Stopping save kernel messages
speech dispatcher disabled;edit /etc/default/speech-dispatcher  WARNING:
All config files
need.conf:/etc/modprobe.d/nvidea-current_hybrid.conf.hidden, it will  be
ignored in a future release.
*Starting Virtual Box Kernel Modules
*Starting Virtual Box Kernel Module...
*Starting MD monitoring service mdadm--monitor
saned disabled; edit /etc/default/saned  *checking battery state...
[2033.461491] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 606863455
[2033.461491] EXT3-fs error(device: sda1): ext3-_get_inode_loc:unable to
read inode block- inode=18964526,block=75857924
....8 more similar messages...
^ ALT DEL produced 3 more messages
Each repeat of ^ ALT DEL yielded an identical message.

Power off, then restart.  Now it is working fine, AFAICT.

This is screaming disk problem, yet tests of the disk say it is fine.  What
else could be failing erratically?

-Denis