Greg Kedrovsky wrote:
> I wonder if someone might know (from the description below) what I did.

It looks suspiciously like a disk going (gone?) bad.  I'd copy your 
lost+found to a different disk and wade through it later.  There's a 
good chance that you might not be able to read anything on that disk 
very soon.

I wouldn't worry about the ext2/ext3 thing.  I believe that I've had 
ext3 partitions labled ext2 in the fstab with no ill effects.  I believe 
that mke2fs -j will create the journal on an ext2 filesystems and go 
merrily forward without editing fstab.

Regards,

-Don