I ran into that one time... nasty.. only thing left to for me was to start all over again. If you use HDF file you should be able to explore these with a program... think it's called "ADF Explorer" or "ADF View" to get hold of importat files, if you use directories well... that would be to obvious?

I always have my HDF's backup from that day forward. Perhaps not a fully up to date backup but every other month or so or when I've done important changes.
Don't know why it went down for you, I'm thinking perhaps romupdate or scsi.device update but I don't know.