David,

Thanks for all your help. Sorry to seem so helpless...

I booted my machine last night using the most recent version of the booter
(of course I had an old one that wouldn't recognize the 1.6 instkernel) and
the 1.6 instkernel. I then was able to jump out to a shell and run fsck on
both my partitions. And I am very happy to say that it fixed my partitions
completely.

I did have to copy a few files that were lost from another server over to
the machine, but it is now completely back up and running. Just for your
information... The reason I was particularly frantic about this crash was
that just the day before this happened, my 60GB Firewire drive that I use
for backing up this server, crashed. And I have had no luck in recovering
that drive yet. So I thought I was going to be completely screwed with both
my original and backups having been lost. The leason learned from all this
is to backup to static media such as CD-R or DVD-R. That way it is less
likely to become corrupt.

Thanks again for your help...

Brian Heath