ext3 partition hosed by PMP7 - all superblocks dead?!?

[Zachary M. Cerza]

I have a drive with an NTFS partition and an ext3 partition. I recently began to
run low on space in the ext3 partition. As I had plenty of room on the NTFS
partition, I (foolishly) used Partition Magic 7 Pro to shrink the NTFS and grow
the ext3. I found out much later (thanks google) that PM7 odesn't support ext3.
Too bad the program itself didn't warn me. 

here's a rouch sketch ;)
old layout: [----NTFS----][---ext3---][swap]
new layout: [---NTFS---][----ext3----][swap]
as you can see, the e3 part was resized *and* moved.

Booting with a grub floppy (my usual method, long story as to why) failed
miserably, so I grabbed my trusty Knoppix disc and booted off that. Running
fsck.ext3 complained about the superblock, and suggested using the -b flag with
various parameters. someone on IRC advised me to use (i think, can't remember
now and I'm at work) mke2fs just to list the superblock locations. I tried all
of them (12 or so), and they all failed the same way.

This is bad. I'd really like to get that data back. I don't have enough space to
dd a copy of the partition somewhere else, and if at all possible I'd like to
avoid having to buy another drive just to do that. I found a tool called
e2salvage that looks semi-promising, but I can't find any bootable CDs that
include it (doh) and Knoppix and its ilk won't allow installing debs or
compiling from source.

In short, heeeelp!!! I'm open to all suggestions, from "try running foo from
knoppix" to "go buy this commercial recovery program called bar."  I'm sorry I
can't give very specific error messages at the moment, I'm away from the
computer and am about to go out of town for a week. I can check mail from where
I'll be, but I obviously can't ssh into this hosed system :)