Question Mark Smiley Face

I've partitioned my iBook, and when I went to choose another start-up disk, nothing happened. I cannot restart or shutdown either. When I tried to choose the keyboard shortcut to choose the start-up disk when the computer turned on, I get the smiley face/question mark. Is my hard drive dying? Is there something I can do to correct this?

Also, when I tried to verify repair permissions, the disk management was disconnected and I had to quit disk utility. Also, when I tried to repair the disk, I got this message:

1 volume could not be repaired

Repairing disk failed with error Could not unmount disk (-10000)