[ILUG] Just how badly messed is my /?

[Marek McGann]

Hi,

I think my laptop shut down uncleanly this morning, and when I got into 
work and turned it on, it complained that the root filesystem had errors 
and that I should run fsck manually ( all of the partitions on the 
harddrive are ext3).

So fsck started its thing, cleared inodes and fixed dtimes, restarted 
and went for a second pass, and a third one, and, well, more than an 
hour and a half later, it's still going (though at this point it seems 
to be just scrolling very large columns of digits past having warned me 
about multiple claims on inodes and something about test bitmaps which 
went past much too quickly for me to see.

So, my question is, just how royally screwed am I? Is there any hope of 
my getting any information back at the end of all this? And can anyone 
recommend any good Linux-friendly data-recovery people?

Actually, as I type it's changed its behaviour and is listing inode 
numbers and mod times (many of which being the same two times in January 
and February.

Anyway, cheers,

M