Your right Anni - apparently this machine is dying and sysadmin is currently building a replacement! (Of course there is no need to inform the
users of this, nor that their data is as good as kaput...)
I don't think I would have figured this out on my own so thanks for your help
I tried the fsck and it was progressing very slowly, I was told that this is basically a bad sign, and followed up with the sysadmin for this machine. That alone took 2 days to find out who; but now I'm back in business.