Murphy you bastard
Anything that can go wrong, will - at the worst possible moment
So, Gentoo was up and running happily - GNOME, Tomboy, Beagle, the whole she-bang. Even my dev. environment was all set up nicely - CMake, OAL, OGL, ODE, etc. all installed.
I had put some finishing touches on my CMake scripts, finally getting Treits building and running to an acceptable level under Linux, I decided to head out and catch a movie...
...two hours later...
I get home and my comp is making weird-ass whirr-beeping sounds, try to use my desktop - whole thing is practically locked up it's so slow.
Thinking it's my motherboard bitching about the heat, I turn it off and let it cool for a half-hour or so... Only to turn it on and have linux complain about data corruption... and then the whirr-beeping starts again. Shit.
I've spent most of the last two weeks using the other computers in the house. A flash new PSU and an Ubuntu LiveCD later, I have a fairly capable box running, *thumbs up*. I guess the only thing to do now is wait until I can afford a new hard drive and hope to hell that everything on it is at least recoverable...
Update: after a few weeks of worrying about it all, I ended up plugging the old drive in... And everything worked! I guess the power/overheating was screwing up the southbridge or something and causing data loss... hmm, oh well, all is good now.