[ILUG] e2fsck, testdisk - failure to find superblocks?

[kae at verens.com]

I've lost a partition on a hard-drive.

Using testdisk, I can navigate around it, see the files and all that, 
but I can't recover it because there is apparently no superblock backup.

Is there any way to recover the damned thing? I have a backup of the 
partition, and am willing to try possibly destructive stuff on it.

I'm tempted to run mkfs on it, but am fairly sure that will write a 
blank FAT with no entries. Or maybe it will see that there's already one 
there, and will just regenerate the superblocks? anyone know?

kae