Data recovery emergency on a downed server... Help please!!

[Madison Kelly]

Hi everyone,

  Well, the fact that I am posting this after 12:00am Sunday night (and on
my birthday, to-boot!) should indicate just how dire the situation is...
I have had a drive failure on a server and I can no longer mount the
data partition on the hard drive (/dev/hda5 [ext3 under RH7.3]) because
the replacement server (Fedora Core 1) claims that the drive's
superblock is toast.

  Now, before anyone rips me a new one, I -DO- have a tape drive but that,
too, has rather depressingly failed. When I try to recover the files
from the IDE Travan 8GB drive it successdully recovers about 50 files
and then fails with this...

 -= Begin Error =-
[root-9CO/sRhIDOA at public.gmane.org tape]# tar zxvf /dev/ht0
.
[bunch-of-files]
.
home/OldC/Program Files/Common Files/Symantec
Shared/VirusDefs/19970902.001/navex15.exp
home/OldC/Program Files/Common Files/Symantec
Shared/VirusDefs/19970902.001/navex15.sys
home/OldC/Program Files/Common Files/Symantec
Shared/VirusDefs/19970902.001/NAVEX15.VXD

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
[root-9CO/sRhIDOA at public.gmane.org tape]#
 -= End Error =-

This is true on three of the tapes I have tried to recover from. The data
was backed up via this simple script:

 -= Begin Script =-
mt -f /dev/ht0 erase
mt -f /dev/ht0 rewind
tar zcvf /dev/ht0 /home/*
 -= End Script =-

I have been Googling for a while now with no success. If anyone has any
clues, by all means -please- share them... Also, if anyone here can
recommend (as a fall back) a data recovery house that won't balk at an
ext3 partition, please forward contact info.

Thanks everyone (again!!!)

The Ever-Stumbling Madison
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