[Liverpool] Disk read failure issue: assistance needed.

[Iain MacGranthin]

I have SuSe 10.0 running on an AMD64 3500 based system with 3 SATA  
drives and 1 ATA drive.

I generally use it for DVB recording (because of stability), media  
conversion and media storage.

Just in the past few days I have received the following disturbing  
reiterative output to screen during reboot after a series of error  
messages:

Additional sense: Unrecovered read error - autoreallocate failed
end request:I/O error, dev sdc, sector xxxxxxx
Buffered I/O error on  device sdc2, logical block xxxxxxxx
ata3: status 0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error}
ata3: error: 0x40 {Unrecoverable Error}
SCSI Error: <2 0 0 0> return code 0x8000002
sdc: Current: sense key: Medium eror

This is followed by instructions to manually fix before rebooting,  
and I am allowed to log into root.

Therea re more error messages, but as these were iterative, they were  
the ones I could copy straight away: I can run through the boot up  
again and try for more information if necesssary...

Now this is tough for me as I am getting into Linux from the shallow  
end, building from source code and using Yast2 to update, without  
having too much to with terminal input and system maintenance type  
knowledge, but moving on as I get things working for me.

Well it looks like that nice easy learning curve got a spanner in its  
works.

How do I start addressing this problem:
Is there something I can use to analyse and repair the disk?
Do I have to change a file to exclude that disk to get Suse to reboot  
into the nice cosy KDE I am used to. If so, will I be able to recover  
the disk?
Is there another forum I should be talking to?

Should I decide to reinstall, how would I be able to access the disk  
in question - could I perform repairs/data recovery that way?

I really am in the dark here, so any help/pointers would be a start...