the CentOS smartctl _does_ work (for me at least) with SATA disks if you use the "-d ata" option. So please try smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda
I was able to run this command and the output is attached. Does anything there point to a disk HW failure? I still think that I'm just suffering from file system corruption.
You can run a long test with smartctl -d ata -t long /dev/sda
I just started this now, and it told me to wait for 70 minutes for the test to complete. How do I check its results?
BTW, I was able to mount the LVM partition and copy some critical files (see my next email). After I did that I first tried to run the long test and got a kernel panic. But that was after getting a bunch of errors when accessing the drive.
Alfred