Help! My AA1 ZG5 has gone haywire

I'm using the Linpus OS and was working on it Friday, when I tried to scp from an unknown server it spat out some warning i had seen before on the work desktop so I didn't pay much attention. About 10-15 minutes later it froze, I had firefox open on a pdf document, and was using kile and the terminal at the time. The mouse icon disappeared and so I held down the power button, switched it off and then on again.

This time it looked like it was loading everything fine on start up and connected to the internet via wireless, and then I opened a terminal to work from and the mouse disappeared again. So I forced shut it down again, this time on rebooting it would not connect to the internet and the settings for the sound, power input/battery, and the internet were all the same as when it froze.

They have not changed after countless reboots and removing the battery for a while. Worse still, the terminal does not recognise the user's folder and you cannot type anything into it. The thunar file systems also does not automatically see any directories unless you give a path name at the top.

The applications work still, such as kile, open office etc etc, and I can open files from within an application. It will not connect to the internet via wireless, or ethernet cable. The run thing still works also.

I am a pretty amateur Linux user and have shown my computer to a few people who know *a lot* more about it than I do, but they couldn't work it out.

Has anyone had any similar problems? Or knows what the hell might be going on? I would love any suggestions please.

Oh, and it won't recognise any external disk so I cannot backup my files so any suggestion that will rescue the files off there would be extremely helpful.

Thanks