I was using transmission to download a film and it crashed, had to use the end current task in the power menu, then reboot to make the device responsive again.

After a reboot, I tried resuming the download only to be given a read only error, so I removed the torrents from transmission and tried deleting them through filebox, to no avail, and then through a root shell, still nothing. Great, I love vfat!

So I ran the usual

root
umount /home/user/MyDocs
fsck -a /home/user/MyDocs

answered yes to the prompts to fix files.

It's now been going for 14 hours 30 mins and is still working.

What I want to know is, whether this is 'normal' or whether I should just cut my losses and reflash, or if anyone has any other ideas.

Cheers

not normal.

Very "not normal" - I'd be inclined to hook it up to your PC and run a file system check from there.

It's going through renaming the contents of my /MyDocs/Downloads directory, all the file names are unreadable, it's renaming them to nice fsck001.001 type name, so I may leave it for a little while longer, the film was a good few gig and failed after about half an hour, so I imagine there's alot of files to go through and rename.

In retrospetive you shouldn't download to your internal flash....

You know, normal flash has limited number of r/w before failure; and yes, that includes fsck. What you're doing is decreasing drastically the lifetime of your internal flash.

I'd back MyDocs and flash the eMMC if I were you.

Yea, hindsight is a great thing...

I'm at work at the moment so I'll leave this to work it's self to death and then flash tonight if it's not sorted.

Given that the number of write cycles within the N900 is probably somewhere around the 1 to 5 million mark, I personally wouldn't even bother to care. You would need to be running fsck for a very long time to make much of a dent - your N900 is likely to fail for other reasons long before that anyway. It'd take probably a decade or so to wear out the flash.

Got bored watching it so I cancelled it after 16 hours, plugged it in via USB and deleted the files using windows.

I don't know why I even started the fsck, I should have just stuck my PC on last night but I really couldn't be bothered.

Is there any way I can check everything's back how it should be, a script I can run?

I can create and delete folders, so I guess that's a start lol.

Can you verify your claim?

SLC NAND is usually rated to around 1,000,000 P/E cycles, then you have to take into account wear leveling.
Personally I think 1-5m is rather conservative.