11:30AM – Hard drive in my laptop died yesterday, started spewing DMA errors during an emerge sync.
11:35AM – Booted from the livecd, bind mounted an empty directory over /var/cache/edb (the affected area) and copied the rest of the filesystem to an NFS server.
11:50AM – Popped over to the wholesaler for a new drive
12:05PM – Popped in new drive, booted livecd, copied filesystem back, reran lilo
12:15PM – Rebooted, re-ran emerge sync, all better.
Whee!