I have had 12.10 installed on my Alienware m11x r3 laptop for a while. Works great, after I installed BumbleBee, until today when I did an upgrade.

I was connected on a wireless network. It was several months since I used Ubuntu on the laptop (I've been absent for a while) so I had a lot of updates to apply. I marked the upgrades in Synaptic because I also wanted to install the Evolution communication suite. At first, the downloads were going great downloading at 2 MB per second or faster. Then, it was going slower and slower. Eventually, I was down to 40 kB/s. Then nothing was downloading at all. I thought it was a temporary issue with the network, so I left the computer running, and I didn't have it plugged in so it died from too low battery.

When I turned it on, it checked the harddrive and found an error while mounting /. So I told it to fix the error, and the machine started. However, there were no network devices detected any more. Again, I thought it was a temporary thing, so I rebooted. Again, it checks the harddrive, didn't find an error but rebooted automatically after the check went to 100 %. Next time it started it went straight to login screen, but again I didn't have any network devices detected. Rebooted again, got disk check again, automatic reboot again, and again no network devices detected.

Now I am on the same laptop, same network, but booted Windows. Works fine. So not a hardware issue. The hard drive is an SSD and has barely been used so whatever issue might be with the hard drive is some sort of file error due to running out of batteries or something such.

What can I try to remedy this situation?