Mint 12 suddenly won't boot

[Binnie Bo Lynnie]

I've been running Mint 12 LXDE for a few weeks. i am a TOTAL NOOB... i installed this particular version at the recommendation of a friend [because my windows vista stopped running, and i didn't have a install disk to repair] ....i don't know what LXDE means, if that tells you anything. ...i believe i installed 32 bit (again, whatever that means...)

anyways, its been running fine until this morning, i came to the computer and it was frozen, and so i cold booted (which i have done before) but this time it wouldn't run. so i opened it in safe mode, and see 'fail fail fail' riddled throughout the text that scrolls by...

next i booted off the disk and it came up, but without any of my personalization or files, and the option to install.

so i tried to poke around in the data and what i *think* was the partition i had previously installed mint to, says "DBus error org.gtk.Private.RemoteVolumeMonitor.Failed: An operation is already pending"

...when i try to 'mount' it (don't really understand that either) , it says "Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda5,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
"

Got NO CLUE as to what this means.

my laptop is about 4-5 years old...

any ideas for this ignoramus???

[reallylostalot]

I'm no expert, but if you can boot via the install cd/dvd, then my first advice is to copy your home folder to an external drive or other suitable media. I've seen this error before, and it was a bad hard drive.

Anyway, you can then check the disk from the live cd/dvd. Open a terminal window, and type "sudo fsck.ext3 /dev/sda1"

This will check the disk for errors and try to fix them.

Good luck.