e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block

[Manudath Gurudatha <manudathg@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I have a debian machine running 2.4 kernel. I have a SCSI hard drive
from another debian machine that seems to have suffered damage due to
power outage.

I am trying to recover the data in the damaged disk. I am able to see
the drive as well as the 3 partitions it had when I boot into my
debain machine. But I am not able to mount it, or run fsck or do
anything that can lead me to some hope.

This is the error message from it (/dev/sdb is my corrupted hard drive
and sdb3 is the partition I am most interested in):

# e2fsck /dev/sdb3
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...
e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb3

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>


Also, I tried running the command:
# dd if=/dev/sdb3 of=/dev/sda7
But sda7 got corrupted too...

I am afraid to use "mke2fs -S" on sdb3 since I cannot afford to loose
the data...

Can you please help me on how can I get the data back?

Regards,
Manudath