My system crash (reiser3 gone)

Question

Well... it had to happen. Everything was too smooth. Everything was working too good. I am trying to stay calm, thinking that my data is on another partition.
The start:
I was doing homework in KDE, just finished some Gimp-ing. I had just started Win4lin ("/etc/rc.d/init.d/Win4lin start"). Then, I needed to start "win" (meaning I had to boot windows, as the daemon/modules/whatever was loaded). The computer froze. One of the few freezes I had my entire life using Linux. I pressed the power button, pressed the power button again.. then I saw it. Kernel panic.. cannot boot.. etc.
The root partition is broken. I have no idea how to fix it. I'm currently posting from Damn Small Linuxm where I tried to mount my home partition with no success.
root@ttyp1[mnt]# mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdc5 /mnt/hdc5
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc5,
or too many mounted file systems
The question is... what do I do now? I want my data back... and I am still calm.
I did some backups... but I haven't moved them from the /home partition, as I used them as backups between KDE upgrades.

Answer 1

Eeek ! more partitions lost
the Ultimate Boot CD has a variety of hard-drive test programs from various manufacturers, maybe try this.
but yes, dd as soon as possible.
just as a bit of extra, ive actually used Penguin sleuth kit.
a lot of the stuff is based around having to present the evidence in a report format, for legal forensic work. To use "the sleuthkit"  takes a lot of form filling that a forensic examiner would have to do. Lost me inside a few minutes
the basic data carving tools are command line anyways, so u could bypass all that stuff.
compare packages for yourself.
http://www.knoppix-std.org/tools.html   under forensics
with
http://www.linux-forensics.com/forensics/pensleuth.html
the ones ive found to work are, with apologies if you know all this stuff anyways:
the basic dd  - taking a bitwise image. variants are dcfldd, dd_rescue.
md5sum / md5deep - ensure the dd image you have taken is an accurate copy of the drive.
fatback - for deleted files on a windows partition. this may not work for you if the partition table is fubar
photorec - its current version retrieves more than just camera images. very good util. can read a drive directly without having to take a dd image, and is non destructive. find the most up-to-date on the latest releases of Knoppix Live CD. comes as part of the Tesdisk package but is quite separate as a utility.
Testdisk - will try and find  lost partitions and effect a repair. be very careful with this and certainly dont use it before you have a valid dd image.
foremost - based on header and footer detail this has a few shortcomings as you specify the max filesize for any recovered images and therefore ends up with small images with huge filesizes.
magicrescue- similar to photorec, works on header and footer but better than foremost. may also be able to work directly on a drive.
my favourites are dd, md5sum, and tesdisk/photorec which i believe are on any basic Live Knoppix CD, but i specialise in image recovery, so maybe biased.
be careful of Specialised Distros as they are less frequently updated, and some of the tools arent in the latest form.
Good luck !