Disk drive recovery help

[tony mollica <tjm3@threedogs.net>]

Hello.

Need a little help with a disk drive.

Until today, my external storage drive was working fine using Debian 4.0 
(latest updates)
and ext2 file system.  It's a 180Gig drive divided into 3 partitions, 1 
primary and 2 logical,
sdg1, sdg5 and sdg6, for example.

I did two things, after which the drive acts unusual.  It powers up but 
takes a few minutes,
then automounts only the third partition(sdg6).  I can mount the second 
partition
manually(sdg5), but the first, and only, primary partiton(sdg1) isn't found.

cfdisk shows all partitions normally.  I can e2fsck 5 and 6, but not 1.
dmesg shows a read error in the sector that partition 1 begins.
Can't access sdg1 at all, tried several different disk programs to 
access the
partition.

Back to the two things.  I tried to change the disk label, 
unsuccessfully,  and there
was a call to check the partition, so I unmounted it and e2fsck'd it. 
Now I can only
get to 2 of the 3 partitions.  Everything seems to be there, but it 
won't recognize
the first and only primary partition.  All the sector numbers seem to 
match using
gpart, lde, cfdisk and fdisk.

Looking for suggestions to find the error in the first partition.

thanks

-----------------
tony