Filesystems are corrupted, due to a power failure or system crash. Generally, after a system crash or power outage (what? No UPS?), the system will come up and repair itself.  If you are using a journalling filesystem like ext3fs, jfs, xfs or resiserfs, it will usually perform a roll-forward recovery from its journal file and carry on. Even with the older ext2fs, the system usually runs an fsck (file system check) on the various file systems and repairs them automatically.  However, just occasionally manual intervention is required - ; you might have to answer 'Y' to a string of questions (answering 'N' will get you nowhere unless you intend to perform really low-level repairs yourself in a last-ditch attempt to avoid data loss).  In the worst case, you might have to reboot from rescue media and manuall run the e2fsck (or similar) command against each filesystem in turn. For example:

* [http://www.howtoforge.com/data_recovery_from_accidentally_deleted_files_or_crashed_drives_in_redhat_centos_and_fedora_linux How to Recover Data Recovery]: Recover Restore accidentally deleted files or crashed drives.