ext2 or 3 recovery

[Byron Poland]

My laptop crashed, and I had to do a hard reboot on it.  It had
several usb drives attached all ext3 file systems.  on the next reboot
and upon plugging in one of the drives, I got a mount error and ran
fsck.ext3 -y on the drive.  It took turned the drive into ext2, and I
after a while I was able to mount it... however all the contents of
the drive where gone.  I know the stuff is still on the drive since it
was never written over, the partition maps and pointers are all lost. 
I've revovered lots of data from formatted drives before in windows
and ntfs using GetDataBack from Runtime Software, and it worked great
seeing stuff from multiple formatings ago, and even seeing stuff that
once resided in vmware virtual disks that were on a drive.

Does anyone have any recommendations for similar software under linux.
 A google search turned up some things like e2salvage, and e2retreive
but I couldn't get e2salvage to work, and e2retrieve cranks away
analyzing but craps out before it actually shows me any results.

Thanks for any tips

(running Ubuntu 5.10)