Folder turned into file

[GyroTech]

Hello all, I have an old machine with Dapper LTS running as a small 
network file server. For some reason recently one of the folders on an 
LVM partition ext3 filesystem 'turned' into a file. I don't want to 
reboot or force a file system check yet without knowing if the files in 
the folder are recoverable in some way since there was a lot of data in 
there.

Can someone help me out in rescuing that data, or is it a lost cause and 
time to maybe replace the hard drive??

Thanks,

GT