Well, that was fun. I was using cdparanoia to rescue the content off of some old audio CDs, and Linux completely died. It managed to corrupt the root partition so badly, that after an e2fsck the only files were in /lost+found. There must be a problem with DMA and CD-audio data on this SiS IDE chipset? It must be a while since I last ripped an audio CD, so perhaps I have really never tried it on this machine before.

Fortunately /home was unaffected, so I have reinstalled Debian and am already almost back to where I started. I am glad I had a backup rfom only a couple of weeks ago — and even more glad that I wasn't forced to test it :-).