it gave me an error of ... something and said i should try to run e2fsck. i try fsck and the other fsck thats on there, forget what its called.
If you want to use FSCK on the empeg, you must follow
these instructions exactly rather than just running it willy-nilly.
But the fact that you have been getting the "no hard disk found" error means that there's something going bad at the hardware level. In that case, FSCK isn't going to help. Go through
the list and rule them out one by one to make certain it's really the drive going bad.