A while back I had a hard drive die with an unrecoverable error on the superblock (ext3) and a few other places. I sent the hard drive to a professional recover

A while back I had a hard drive die with an unrecoverable error on the superblock (ext3) and a few other places. I sent the hard drive to a professional recovery firm who were as incompetent as incompetent can be. I got the duff drive back and decided to have a go myself. Recovering the superblock was easy - there are extra copies of that. I then did a full map of the drive listing bad blocks, and did a reverse map to work out which files contained those blocks. Luckily, the only file that contained any bad blocks was a swap file, so I recovered absolutely everything. Other bad blocks were in unallocated space. Ext3 is actually a sane enough disc layout that it is possible to work out what is going on manually. I would have been stuffed if it had been a more complicated filesystem.