Now wondering how this happened - did I let it too near my mobile phone or
something?


In my experience most of these systems hold the index in memory, and
the data on the disk. Only at intervals do they flush the index
changes onto the disk. As each file is very rarely held in one
contigious lump, you need the index to find all the bits and put them
back together in the right order.

Also I have found most of these system have multiple indexes, so that
various activites can be undertaken at speed. The "fixer" programs use
the multiple indexes to try and reserect the files.

A directory, is only a special type of file, it is not the index.

I would start by reading the device in "raw" (charcater) mode. If you
can read all the 16M they the device itself is not damaged, only the
indexes. If this fails, then the device is most likley damaged. Once
you have read the device, you can sit with the filesystems source
code, and binary dumps of your device and piece it all back together
again. This ls a long boring exercise not to be recommended to anyone
who is not totally desprate. If you pay someone to fo it expect 500
quid a day+, and a few days/weeks work.

In case you are wondering I re-wrote fsck for both BSD and EFS
filesystems.

Rick