Big disk/filesystem issues...

[Dennis Ruzeski]

I've got a 160G external usb hard drive. It's got my life on it so I'd really love to get the data back. 

I try to mount it and I can't get it to mount. An fsck gives the following:
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while checking ext3 journal for /dev/sdb1

It is an ext3 filesystem. I can use qtparted to view the partition, but I can't figure out how to repair it.
(I have tried to replace the superblock)

testdisk shows a problem, but it doesn't seem to write the fix to the disk on exit.

Anyone have any experience with this? I'd like to do it without using TCT- I don't have enough disk space handy..

TIA, 
--Dennis