I hope you had a backup! The only thing you can do is use the "file" command and "strings" commands to identify binary files and use a pager like "less" to view them. That is, if it didn't get hosed as well. Your best bet to recover the files is to boot off some sort of rescue disk if you can't boot your main Linux system. Another thing to watch out for from my own experiences with trashed filesystems, is that some weird permissions can get set when files get put in lost+found. These include the rather rarely used Linux-specific permissions that can make a file undeletable, but still writable. See the man pages for chattr and lsattr to find out what these weird permissions are. Also, modification dates can be rather strange. Out of curiosity, do you know what caused the filesystem to get mangled? I've only had it happen with EXT3 one time and that was when I was running parted to resize a partition from the Slackware Live CD and ran out of memory. Parted terminated midway through resizing, and I ended up having to restore two partitions, one of which was my Slackware root partition. For backups, I suggest getting hold of dump from http://dump.sourceforge.net. It works just like ufsdump on Solaris systems, and dump on some other Unix systems. It makes backups and restorations fairly painless. It is especially handy for restoring individual files as you can interactively navigate the backup and add what needs to be restored to a list to extract. It was originally designed for tape drives, but works just as well with hard drives, zip drives, and pretty much anything that can store files.
