I guess I need to take this as "good" and "bad" news. I did give both of these commands a try and keep getting the same error over and over, 'bad superblock'. So I take it that likely means the bad news is the data on the drive is likely gone, good news that I know how to prevent it in the future?
The problem occurred after the power supply committed suicide. Everything else (except this new 250 gig drive) is working just fine. As a matter of fact the bios still recognizes the drive and when I use webmin to look at the hard drives I have the option of creating a new partition but have opted not to in hopes I might still be able to reclaim the data before attempting repartitioning.
Any other suggestions before I bite the bullet and repartition? Anybody?
Uncle Jim wrote:
The command "tune2fs -l" will tell you what the blocksize is for a partition. If you have a good partition created at about the same time you could use this to make a first guess at the blocksize for the bad partition.
From here it is a lot of trial and error and luck. Kinda makes you want to go
write down a list of backup superblocks for your favorite partitions, doesn't it?