Help! fsck.ext2 possibly non-existent!??! <= that's my data!

[bronto]

Looks like I've got myself a serious problem here.

YellowDog 2.2 on a Beige G3.  It has three hard disks; a small Mac 
one for booting the Mac into OS9, a 4GB drive with all of the YDL 
stuff on it, and a new 60GB drive I installed last month just for 
data.  The 60gb drive is mounted at /home.  Or is supposed to be. 
Until now has worked flawlessly.

I was working happily along on one of my web sites, hosted on this 
YDL Mac, when I started getting strange errors.  Data stuff.  I went 
over to the server and tried to log out of my normal user account, 
and the thing just freaked out and froze.  I rebooted the server, and 
when it came time to mount the data drive, I get this error:

Checking filesystems
fsck.ext2: Possibly non-existent or swap device?
No such device or address while trying to open /dev/hdb2 
	[FAILED]

*** an error occurred during the file system check.

Then it gives me an option to drop into repair mode.  I do so, open 
fstab with VI, remove the line for /dev/hdb2, reboot, and everything 
is operational except for Apache (which opens files on the data 
drive), and of course my /home directory isn't there.

the Big Question:  Now what?  How do I figure out what happened, and 
how do I fix it?

Anyone?  Please?

Rob