1) rebooting into a rescue CD environment (not allowing the rescue environmentto mount or fsck your filesystems).
2) Nuke the ext3 journal:
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/(possibly doing the same for other problem partitions)
3) Do a fake fsck to see the extent of damage:
fsck -fn /dev/(after checking things out.. use "-fy" once you're sure that it's safe)
4) Rebuild the journal w, "
tune2fs -j /dev/(rerun at least once until "clean" result is repeatable)
5) Mount and check things out,
"mkdir /mnt/tmp && mount -t ext3 /dev/ /mnt/tmp"
6) Gracefully umount & reboot:
"umount /mnt/tmp && shutdown -rf now && exit"
