Ok, I've been running Knoppix v3.3 hard drive installed for some time, and every 40 mounts of my root partition have caused a forced fsck check on the device this is held on, /dev/hda1...

Everything has been going great, even though this check can take some time, before Knoppix will actually complete its booting, until, this morning... Upon booting, fsck forced its usual 40 mounted checking, and then printed the following (pardon if I don't type this exactly, considering it was in a boot screen, I didn't have copy/paste) :

/dev/hda1: ***** REBOOT LINUX *****
/dev/hda1: somebignumber/somebignumber (1.2% non-contiguous) somebignumber/somebignumber

fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot [blah, blah, blah]

CONTROL-D to exit this shell, and reboot

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ok, now I am lost - what happened, what should I "have" done? Having no clue what to do in this situation, I did a CTRL-D, rebooted, and came in here to post for help. How much damage am I doing by not "doing what I was supposed to do before", and such???

Is this severe? Can it be recovered? What should I do NOW? And, lastly, if this happens again, what should I have done?

Thanks in advance, this boot message has got me scared here,
Cuddles