Forced fsck on Ubuntu 8.10 boot

During the boot I got one of those "filesystem has been mounted X times, time for a checkup" messages. I didn't particularly want that, I had other things to do, so pressed Esc to skip. It kinda hanged, and I may have pressed Esc again. Messages spewed across the screen, and Iwas forced to a shell prompt with an instruction to run fsck. Didn't want to do that, so rebooted. Dumped to shell prompt again with an instruction to run fsck. On running fsck, I get many screens of not-very-nice looking messages, and then this:

Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 16777358

Error reading block 16777358 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while getting next inode from scan. Ignore error? yes

Force rewrite?

Scary. Similar messages have been seen by others, and they've succeeded to get their system back by answering 'yes' to the above questions. Personally, this looks like the point where you will likely lose everything, so if there's anything you value, seek professional help. Answering 'yes' worked for me, but I have no idea what damage has been done. Time for a new hard drive.