[KLUG Members] won't boot, superblock error

[bill]

On booting I get a "superblock could not be read or does not describe a
correct ext2 filesystem . . ."

It offers a command to fix things that is:

e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

which doesn't fix anything but returns the above message.

To my knowledge I didn't reformat the drive (an old windows formatted
drive) to make an ext2 filesystem so I'm not sure it is an ext2
formatted drive.  So what gives, dying/dead HD?

Any ideas for rescuing it?

kind regards,

bill