> Maybe something came loose in the drum and whacked the sensor.
That's exactly what happened.
Not sure exactly what failed first, but when I popped off the rotor, all sorts of interesting things came pouring out. About half of the tone wheel has been turned into little chunks and the e-brake shoe was more or less floating around freely in a few different pieces.
Why things would have blown apart at just that moment is still a bit of a mystery to me, since as mentioned earlier, I hadn't been messing with the brakes at all and hadn't previously had any issues there.
It would seem that at one scenario that can lead to the ambiguous codes 42 and 44 is to have the tone wheel blow apart inside the drum.
Car seems perfectly drivable for now. I'll deal with all that misery when I get home.
Btw, I've been doing this work outside a tent in the woods, so every time I need a new tool, it's an hour and a half walk each way. I've just finished up a couple of months work in the bush and figured the campsite was as good a place as anywhere to get my car up to snuff before winter hit. (It's almost impossible to find any where to work on a car in Vancouver - a whole town built without driveways or garages). I've already dealt with all the usual suspects in the front end - bearings, ball joints, CV joints - but it looks like the rear end may still need a bit of attention before I start asking this thing to get me to the ski hill all winter.
Thanks for all the insightful help. And patience with my rather limited grasp of what sorts of problems ABS can actually cause.