After many many reboots in a couple days while experimenting with BIOS settings effecting the speed Hardbrake runs at, today I find after a reboot that I have to type in password to log in - ordinarily I have this disabled.

When I DO enter my password, it goes to a black screen for a bit, then returns. I can log in as guest, which does the same thing (minus the password) and if I use the wrong password, it complains instead of doing the same.

Using the install disc, I see three partitions on my drive, a ~200 MB boot sector, and two 32 GB (one extended) which seem to share the rest of the SSD.

Running FSCK seems to generate tons of errors.

The odd bits: All my background stuff is running - I can access stuff served by Subsonic, and see network shares from my windows machines. I can log in in another terminal and do stuff... I just can't get into the GUI/OS proper.

Sort of at a loss where to start. Would be happy to free drive of errors if I could (I've another machine, I could mount drive over USB and check it), but it seems everything else is working?

edit: Screensaver also seems to kick on, even from fsck's run from the boot menu.

i3-2100t, H67 chipset I believe, 12.10, everything's been working fine for the better part of a year. Seen several similar topics, but either they turn out to be something unrelated (fresh install or known graphics issues) or there are no answers. I'm happy to get any logs/info anyone want.