I understand ext2/3 file systems don't need de-fragging but I thought that was because it kept external fragmentation down to a very low level - is this still "low"? Or does the way linux reads files mean this isn't a problem?

here's a bit of background - my system crashed while I was using menudrake on a fresh installation of mdk 10 on my home pc. On rebooting I ran file system integrity check which detected a problem on the partition mounted as / - "/lost+found not found" - this caused another reboot. I ran integrity check again which found the same problem on the partition mounted as /home but fixed it without needing a reboot but reported this figure of 10.6% non-contig. /home is a 40G ext3 primary partition. Everything seems OK right now but am I going to run into problems?

"On rebooting I ran file system integrity check which detected a problem on the partition mounted as / - "/lost+found not found" - this caused another reboot. I ran integrity check again which found the same problem on the partition mounted as /home but fixed it without needing a reboot "

/lost+found being missing is no problem but it raises the question of why they were deleted. Did you delete them on purpose? You should look in each /lost+found whenever you run
fsck. fsck places orphan file and lost file fragments in /lost+found and assigns them a number name in lieu of the unknown real name. If you have numbered files or directories in /lost+found you should chekc them out to see what they really are.

"reported this figure of 10.6% non-contig. /home is a 40G ext3 primary partition. Everything seems OK right now but am I going to run into problems?"

Fragmentation is not going to cause you any problems per se. 10.6% is high and may be an indication that the crash caused pieces of files to be lost (i.e. dumped into /lost+found).

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