inittab missing, what do I do?

[CRRoot at dstsystems.com]

OK gurus, here's the situation.  I had my dual boot PC running under Linux
the other night, when my wife called me away to do something.  I locked the
machine and walked away, expecting to be gone momentarily.  Well, I never
got back to it that night and by the time I got home last night, the power
had been knocked out due to the storm.

Now, we all know that improperly exiting Linux is a Bad Thing.  But I'd had
this happen before and thought I knew what to do.  When it could not
successfully boot up and prompted me for the root password, I signed on and
entered

fsck /dev/hda5

and answered "y" to all the questions.   Then I rebooted, and it seemed to
be setting up okay until it displayed a line to the effect that "inittab is
missing.  Select a runlevel".    No matter what  runlevel I choose, it
tells me that "There are no more processes running at that level".

My questions are:   What do I do to fix this?  and What should I have done
in the first place to avoid this?

Obviously I could have shut all the way down the other night, but after
hearing so much about the legendary stability of Linux I thought it would
be alright for a day.

Any help would be appreciated.  Thank you.
Cory