[ILUG] Just how badly messed is my /?

[Marek McGann]

paul at clubi.ie wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Marek McGann wrote:
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Yes, look in lost+found/ once fsck is finished. inodes that fsck 
> disconnects from the namespace are linked into that directory.

Thanks. fsck has just finished. Things restart rather promisingly 
(Kubuntu splashscreen as normal as far as mounting root), then it spits 
out the following and drops me to a prompt:

mount: Mounting /dev/hda1 on /root failed: Invalid argument
mount: Mounting /root/dev on /dev/.static/dev failed: No such file or 
directory
mount: Mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: Mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init

The shell it drops me to is BusyBox v1.01 (Debian 1:1.01-4ubuntu3) 
Built-in shell (ash), which seems like something of a recovery tool. 
There's no /home (which was a separate partition mounted as /home before 
things got borked).

Will it take much to get things working (or close to) again? Or should I 
opt for the nuclear option of formatting and reinstalling (an MS 
approach, I appreciate, but I really don't know much about what I'm 
doing, and with /home on a separate partition, I'm hoping it didn't get 
trashed in the same way / seems to have).

Cheers,

M