Best Practices for Data Recovery for corrupted EXT2/3?

[Thomas Weeks]

Hey all..

I had a bad IDE controller that hosed my EXT3 filesystems.  A resulting fsck 
damaged pat of the filesystem and the root inode is gone (on my main drive 
AND the backup drive).   I immediately DD'd the main drive over to an 
identical drive that I have been working on.  But every time.. a fsck 
destroys all the data (moves everything to lost+found) and nothing that I've 
found is able to restore the dir structure... or allow me to superposition 
any of the subdirs (such as /home/*).

I've tried testdisk, dd_recover, and Autopsy.. mounting and fsking with 
alternate superblocks, all with no success. 

I would like to retain file names.. as I see that SOME filename/dir structure 
is intact when the fsck starts nuking all my files that don't have a parent 
dir (e.g. ../home/user/file1 --> lost+found).  Is there a way that this 
information can be salvaged?  Or a new fake root inode be slid into place and 
all the links associated?

My last ditch effort will be to allow the migration to lost+found and then try 
to copy off files based on UID/GID/date, but I would really like to retain 
file names. 

Any related into would be useful... but my hopes are not high.

Tweeks