Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read

[Chris St. Pierre]

I've got Yellowdog installed on a powerbook (not my first such installation),
and it has just died.  When I start it up, it tells me I have to do a manual
fsck; when I do so, it comes to one particularly problematic line:

Error reading block 32770 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in
short read) while reading inode and block bitmaps.  Ignore error<y>?

If I hit 'y', it just starts spewing random crap on the screen, and my only
choice is to restart.  If I hit 'n', it tells me:

e2fsck: Can't read an block bitmap while retrying to read bitmaps for
/dev/hda11

(My root on hda11.)  Now, that sentence isn't exactly grammatical, and, on top
of that, I can't totally figure out what's happening.  Worse, googling for
that phrase yeilds *nothing* -- and I mean *nothing* -- so it appears that no
one else in the history of the planet has ever had this problem.  (I can
search for "Attempt to read..." and get hits, however.  I can't say they're
terribly helpful, though, for the most part.)  I've got my machine dual
booting with OSX, which works fine, so I'd ruled out any serious hard drive
issues (more about which shortly).  I found an old post from a redhat list
that suggested running e2fsck -c to mark the sector as bad, and then e2fsck
-cc to remap the drive, but I tried both of these to no avail -- i.e., the
same thing happens as just running e2fsck.

I posted to a redhat list, and one guy suggested that my hard drive was dying
a slow and painful death.  I am loath to consider this, though, so if anyone
has better options, please let me know.

Chris St. Pierre

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"We can all love everything, without ever knowing why."
             --David Pomeranz, as sung by John Denver