dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1000000 count=512
where X is the specific drive a,b,d
Obviously the screwed up the first superblock totally. Normally this would not be a big problem but for one drive - /dev/sdb - this seem to have caused havoc.
See all drives have (had) a EXT2 fs. The only one not recogniced by Linux as native EXT2 was /dev/sdb. This is a WD15EARS not formatted with advanced format. First sector started at 63 instead of 64 as a proper advanced format. This drive showed up as a GPT EFI partition when doing fdisk -lu on it before the dd-incident.
I have hooked it up to my XP machine with R-Studio 5.4 on and scanned it. R-Studio finds the EXT2 fs as "Recognized 14" along with 13 very small FAT partitions. The EXT fs seem to have the proper size though. Sad part is the the only files R-Studio finds are meta files. Log say "Enumeration if files for Recognized 14 failed"
OK Off to see what Extra Found Files can give. Let R-Studio work for a couple of hours, come back to the machine and R-Studio has crashed

Hmmmm reboot PC just to be safe and start up R-Studio again. Load the scan from file and try to enumerate the Extra found files again, this time keeping an eye on the screen. At least this time R-Studio works all the way until it's time for it to present the file browser and crash again

OK third run and now I stop the process about half way through. Now I get the browser and I can see found files. For example a bunch of MS Excel files. All with random names. When trying to open such file Excel complains but most of the document looks like it's fine.
Is this the only probable way to get the data back? Is there any way to find the proper names of the files and connect them to the files themselfs ?????
As I write this R-Studio have just finished loading up the EXT2 partition for another drive and it looks like the situation is the same on this one. "Recognized 2" the EXT2 partion found on the disk only contains Metafiles. Extra found files is totally empty

I'm not familer with the struckture of any file system I do know EXT2 holds file info in Inods and there are files called Inode-something on the Recogniced ## EXT2 partitions if that can help me.
Please advice