Can't tell if I have been hacked :(

[A.G.]

On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 10:05 -0500, Lovell Mcilwain wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> Can you give me some input on whether I have been hacked or not?
> 
> I logged into my machine via ssh and found that I couldn't run any 
> commands and got a input/output error.  I couldn't run the who command 
> to see if anyone else was logged into my machine and I couldn't check my 
> firestarter log to see if I have been breached.
> 
> I was able to run an ls -al and found that a lot of my permissions had 
> ???? as the owner.  My gnome interface is pretty much disappeared and 
> all I see is the background.  I can't shut down this machine because the 
> halt and shutdown commands are not recognized (I get the same 
> input/output error)

Sounds more like a hard drive/filesystem error. If you can run dmesg,
try that and see if you notice any errors in it. 

Then I suggest you try booting from a rescue disk to view your logs
(especially /var/log/messages), fsck, grab important files, etc.