boot questions

the blackout caused my server to shut off instantly. so when i booted up again,
i had all sorts of problems that i don't understand. my filesystems were not,
obviously, unmounted cleanly, so i had fsck forced. and so ensued a zillion
messages about this block and that i_node. it is the most unclear, unintuitive,
yet most stressful part of my entire computing experience, i think.

so...my questions are...what do i do? ignore errors? auto fix them? if i don't
auto fix them, how can i boot? other OSes auto-fix errors in filesystems. what
is an i_node? why are they 64 instead of 8? why does this part of booting have
to be so freaking stressful and opaque?

everytime this happens, i go fsck -a, choose <ignore> and <y>, and i ultimately
go on with booting and computing. thus, the entire process seems silly.

vora