Hey guys here's what happened.

On my laptop (gentoo 2.6.16) I wanted to resize the linux partition so I could put win98 for some classic gaming at warp speed... ok 900mhz "warp"

Well I didn't have Gparted on hand, so I used Partition Magic off Hiren's Boot CD -- big mistake. Long story short, in reducing the ext3 linux partition it died and I had to reboot.

Expecting my system to be royally screwed, gentoo booted! Sweet! Well, no. I ran fsck, and to my horror I got craploads of crosslinked inodes.

Well I finally "fixed" it by running fsck -y -f and then taping my 'y' key down. It ended up fscking thru, and I got win98 running, but now fluxbox doesn't run.

I think this has something to do with my /lost+found being so full it takes 3 minutes to list. During the fsck process I noticed thinks like: "Inode 543242 linked to /usr/share/??? not used, move to lost+found?" and of course I said yes. (Because the 'y' key was still taped down and I was at lunch)

Now - I see a few solutions:
1) Suck it up and reinstall everything
2) Delete the contents of /lost+found and then rebuild every freaking package on my computer to fix files that were orphaned for good
3) Do what some good samaritan suggested to simply and cleanly untangle this mess

Any ideas? I would really like there to be a simple and elegant way of solving this - thanks in advance.

-Bill

UPDATE:

Well, maybe I posted too soon - but the root problem still remains.

I rebuilt fluxbox... all's well that ends well. Hey, it works now, everything seems to. My lost+found folder is still packed with 1.14gb of crap that apparently was copied back in place by fsck (thank god!).

Just to check, I popped into one of the folders in lost+found. I found some ebuilds and such that belong in /usr/portage..., but they existed there too. It would seem that I could just delete all that stuff in lost+found... right?

Things are going well, so I don't want to ruin anything with a stray rm command.

-Bill