I think, with my capability for pushing the wrong button at critical moments, I might be safer to stick with ext2 then.
Well, I admit that I found out about this the hard way. But I think that was when I was running slink; the woody versions of the tools all seem to spit out warnings if you try and treat ext3 as ext2.
AIUI running fsck on ext2 will return the filesystem to a logically consistent state but doesn't guarantee that you won't lose or corrupt any files - as you've found out. ext3's journalling is a big safeguard against this. It is unfortunate that power failures are one area where this safeguard is noticeably incomplete.
If you have and ext3 that you want to revert to ext2, you can just:
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/hdXX
-Roberto
pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
