[plug]

[Craig Ringer]

> I have a funny feeling that the BIOS detected the wrong translation
> type (LARGE) for the disk, instead of using CHS or LBA (unfortunately
> I can't remember what it was using on the old P166), and if so - has
> fsckíng the drive possibly destroyed the data completely?

Quite likely :-(
If you did a "fsck -n -f" it'll be fine, but if you did a read/write 
fsck things might not be so happy. 13 hours strikes me as an amazingly 
long time... something funny must be going on.

> Just want
> to know if there's a possible way I could retrieve anything off the
> partition before formatting it. (I had my website, DNS zone files,
> firewall config, dhcp config etc. on there, no backup)

Hard to say. Maybe if you can get the geometry right then mount the 
partition - otherwise, I can only think "disk editor".

OTOH, it might not be disk geometry that's the problem - in which case 
all bets are off.