Strange Debian Behavior

I have a box in my “testing network” at the office that is running debian testing (is that still considered sarge? or sid? dunno). It was running perfectly fine (w/ X windows) until recently. I was asked to retrive some data off a harddrive (ntfs) so I shoved it in this box — and thats when the troubles began. It started running EXTREMLY slow (taking over an hour to boot). Also X Windows stopped working and console access was very difficult — there is a 60 second time out between when you hit enter after typing in your user name and completing your password, if you dont enter your password in time it kicks you off. Now what happens when it takes 50seconds just for the password prompt to come up — you see the problem now?

After I was done with the data backup I shutdown the machine (slowly) and unplugged the drive. Now the machine is still screwed up. Still slow, still no X, and now it picked up a new trick. Today I did a “shutdown now” — and it shutdown all the way to init 1 (asked me for my root password or ctrl+d to continue — strange) then turned around and booted back to init 3.