Dear Rkauer!
After more investigation, it seems that my dear Gayle was not so hurt but that my 2.5" hard disk really died. I managed to reinstall my system on an old spare hard disk and it is
up and running again 
I think that Gayle or something else got hurt though: I used to use BlizKick and its two modules
ColdResetCard and DosResetCard to reset my PCMCIA network card but, since the crash, these two modules cause BlizKick to fail with returncode 10
Fortunately, I found out two replacements commands,
CardPatch and
CardReset, that do the same things and work well!
I will no go on replacing this old spare hard disk with something more stable and recent, maybe one of these
CF hard disks...
Take care!
Yann