After I left for work this AM, there was a power failure at the house. When the power came back on, my Debian box did not recover. I had my son peek at the console for me and issue a reboot command. The system did shut down a number of services, but at least one service it tried to shut down wasn't running, so the shutdown took quite a while. On reboot, the box reports a file system error (no big surprise). It apparently tries to fix the file system (there's some sort of "x% done" thing in the lower right corner of the screen). It then booted up to a prompt that said, "Enter root password for maintenance." Sorry there isn't more detail, but this is all what he was able to describe.

After logging into the maintenance prompt, I had him type "fsck." The shell replied, "file not found." (Scary!!) The shell IS able to find the ping command (unfortunately, the box is not alive on the network; it looks like none of the network stuff was initialized). An ls shows that he's in root's home directory. The hostname of the box is not in the prompt as it usually is.

I'm pretty much a Linux noob, so my question is: When I get home tonight, what steps should I take to try to recover the box? The Debian install is current unstable. IF I RECALL CORRECTLY, I had it use journalling, but that's pure memory from back in December. Among other things, this box is my email server. All help appreciated!