File system question

[Jeffrey Benton]

Ok guys, I normally do not have a whole lot to say here, but I seem to be in
a little trouble and would appreciate any help you would like to throw my
way.  First of all, the probably meaningless specs on my Linux system:

Pentium 233 MMX
128 MB RAM
5.1 GB HDD with /, /boot, /home, and swap partitions.
Running Linux Mandrake 7.0

Anyway, after 71 days of uptime I finally had to shutdown my system to swap
a CD audio cable.  I know this did not cause my problem, but upon rebooting
I receive the following message:

<snip>

Checking root filesystem
Fsck.ext2(null):
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is
corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternative superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8139 <device>

: Is a directory while trying to open /    [FAILED]

*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal startup):

</snip>

Well, I'm not a total newbie so I thought I had a general understanding of
what needed to be done.  First of all, hitting Ctrl-D just reboots the
system, only to get the same thing.  So, I entered my password and tried
running e2fsck -b 8139 <device> and e2fsck -b 16385 on all three of my ext2
partitions.  It seemed to find something wrong with my /boot partition but
did not find an alternate superblock on the / or /home partitions.  I also
ran a check for bad blocks on each partition, which said it correct some bad
inodes but did not improve the situation.  Therefore, I am at a loss and
would really appreciate any help you can give.  All of the data on the drive
is still intact but I cannot back up data to other partitions because the
file system is in read-only mode.

Thanks.

Jeff