After unplugging the computer and plugging it back in it was able to find the drive again but now e2fsck gives some strange errors on a couple of the partitions (/work1, /data1 I think:
fsck.ext3: Filesystem has unsupported feature(s) (/data1)
e2fsck: Get a newer version of e2fsck!
The filesystem hasn't changed so I don't know if the superblock is corrupt, e2fsck got "updated" with a regression, or what.
Bottom line is this. Avoid rebooting bblinux1, and if you have files you
personally care about, make a backup. (There are already backups of most
material on that machine, but not all.)