Allegedly, on or about 28 July 2014, Barry sent:
You were right. I booted with a rescue disk and fsck found many errors on the root partition. many Anyway they seemed to be fixable, and on rebooting, I was able to reinstall yum and then other stuff.
The only problem is that now I lost my top and bottom panels. This is an XFCE spin, and I wanted to take a look at it. I liked what I saw, but I don't really trust the drive. it's an old laptop, and probably not worth a lot more time.
To have a look, without wasting money on a new hard drive, you could try making an install that runs off a USB flash drive. They're cheap, and immediately re-useable, if you don't thrash it to death with your test.
Sure, a live DVD could give you a trial look, too. But it's such a painfully slow medium.