ext2 Advice

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu]

...so a week ago my mailserver's power supply blew, taking the
motherboard with it. Aggravation ensued, as I wasn't planning on
spending the money on a new machine right about now, but I did it
anyway. The new machine became my new workstation, my workstation
became the new mailserver.

Yesterday the mailserver disk died. e2fsck stopped saying that it
couldn't find a superblock. I specified a second superblock, and
it didn't like that either. There are two partitions on this disk,
and both were showing the same problems.

I experimented on the less valuable partition with mke2fs -S, to
create new superblocks, followed by an immediate e2fsck... which
claimed that there wasn't anything on the partition. Sigh.

Since then it's been unplugged. I've called two data recovery places;
one wants $500 to evaluate it, thinks there's a good prognosis but
says it will cost $1000-$5000 overall. The other hasn't got back to 
me yet, but quotes an hourly rate of $175.

The most valuable things missing are our honeymoon photos, about 500MB
worth, but $5K would almost pay for another trip Down Under. Anyone
have any bright cheery ideas?

-dsr-