[tlug] EXT3 journal not found

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On my testbed/system under construction, I found it gone stiff this morning,
with the screensaver locked.  Not pingable from any other machine on
my network

During the reboot, it got as far as mounting the filesystems, and came back with
"EXT3 journal not found device ide0 (3,2)" and panicked.

Hardware problem, ugly fallout from whatever made it go stiff, or software
problem?  

Does anybody know a fix for this (recreate a journal based on the current
info, or somethign), or am I doomed?  An install is no big deal, it's currently
just my test machine, but if I can save the time and learn something about
journal recovery, I will.

The OS is Red Hat 7.3 beta 2, an unknown factor, but on the other
hand, the disk is also new (40 GB IBM), so it's an unknown as well.

I'm currently booting from a floppy because the BIOS seems to not like booting
from disks that large (/boot is completely within the first 8 GB, but
I never even get a boot prompt out of it), and need to try flashing the BIOS
to a newer rev (the board's only 15 months old or so, you'd think it wouldn't
be bothered, but...).

TIA,

Jonathan