partition table problem with 3.2 kernel

My system is an amd64 ubuntu 12.04, recently upgraded from 11.10.

Everything was fine post upgrade for a good while until today. I think I did some package upgrades last boot, probably a couple of days ago, but not sure what they were now. Kernel headers maybe? I seem to remember doing them at some point quite recently.

Now what is happening is that it cannot mount anything apart from the root partition (/dev/sda3). There should be a couple of NTFS partitions and a swap partition off the same drive that won't mount. I can't fdisk that disk /dev/sda at all (as root). It just gives me errors. I will emphasise that I CAN see the root partition on that drive though which is a bit weird. The drive is ATA.

There's some weird stuff with the display too - the boot screen is like it can't get the graphics together so it's all text based. It doesn't seem very happy to go into X either. I don't get a window manager. Figure it's all the same issue though.

The kernel is 3.2.0.24. When I boot up into the only other kernel on the system which is I think 3.0.0.19 (from before the upgrade) it does see the partition table fine. I can't get nvidia display drivers happening though presumably because of version incompatibilities so using that one isn't really an option for me.

I have tried to apt-get upgrade and got a couple of new packages down - nothing fundamental though, xserver is about it - so am completely up to date but no dice.

Any advice would be hugely appreciated. I don't want to mess around too much with it without knowing what's happening incase I hose the partition table.

Oh - the windows system on one of the NTFS partitions is booting fine too and sees both the NTFS partitions also.

Help!