The EQ and playlists are stored on the scratch partition, and thats a partition only the player knows how to read. (Not sure the /dev/hda# off the top of my head, and my serial cable is at work).

I'll print out that attachment and show it to some of the Unix people around my cube area and see if they can tell what happened, and if it can be recovered. It really seems odd every fix fsck wanted to do was one number off in one direction or another.