Killed my root fs....best way to get back?

[thegoonden]

I was watching a dvd in a second Xserver, when finished, I went back to display 0. As I did so I got a flashing light on the keyboard and the system locked up. I usr cntrl alt sysrq to reboot and on reboot I was told that my root partition was damaged. I ran fsck. First thing it did was tell me the ext3 journal was broken, and it deleted it. Then I agreed with all it's "fixes" this left me with only Lost+found on my root partition, and that appears to be a symlink to another partition, so that can't be right.
2 questions really.
1. should I re-run fsck from another linux ( or boot disk) in the hope that lost+found will be set right, and I can then hopefully manually get a system back. Or is there some other way to stop lost+found being broken.
2. Assuming I'm screwed, and given that /usr was on another partition, what is my best method of recovery. I'm thinking of re-unpacking a gentoo base tarball (stage 2, as for some reason I can't find stage 1), and starting from there.

Any thoughts or advice greatly appreciated, because there's only so long I can stand Mandrake for

[thegoonden]

Got MOST of lost and found back, still missing a few things in there ( like most of /etc for a start). Just wondering if there is an easy way to return what I find in there to it's correct place, other than openning every sub directory, and guessing where it's contents should go.