Data loss on IDE drive after crash

[Gopikrishnan Sidhardhan <gs33@eng.buffalo.edu>]

Hi,

I am running Fedora Core 2 on an Athlon 2500+ machine with Samsung 
Spinpoint SP0411N 40GB hard drive.  When trying to configure the X 
server for an Nvidia card, the machine froze (this is not the problem).  
Since I did not have access to any other machines on the network at the 
time, I hard rebooted it.

At that point, I had my X configuration file open.  My root partition is 
a small ext2 partition, and on reboot the machine fscked this partition 
and gave me a message like "Deleted i-node for /etc/X11/xOrg.conf 
CLEARED"  (This is from memory).  On reboot, I found that the X config 
file mentioned above had been erased.  Not a trace of it remained..:-)

I don't know if this is a known issue, but I sure would like to hear an 
explanation.  The kernel is the stock kernel provided along with Fedora 
Core 2 (2.6.5-1.358).

Problem is. I can't do more testing for this.  This is a machine I use 
extensively and I don't want the yank the power on it too much.

Thanks,
--Gopi