I'd really appreciate some help with this but I do fear the worst.

Yesterday I had a broken super block on my boot drive sda1 which I fixed by finding the backup superblocks with:

   mke2fs -n /dev/sda1

Then by replacing the corrupted superblock with:

   e2fsck -b <backup_superblock_number>/dev/sda1

This I thought had fixed the problem, Linux booted up went through a fschk on all disks which passed and gave me a desktop that seemed okay. I left it over night and thought I'd grab the home partition and replace the physical disk in the morning to be on the safe side.

Today I can't see sda?

lsscsi returns:

    [0:0:0:0] cd/dvd SONY DVD RW AW-G170A 1.71 /dev/sr0
    [2:0:0:0] disk ATA WDC WD5000KS-00M 07.0 /dev/sda
    [3:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31500341AS CC1H /dev/sdb
    [4:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31500341AS CC1H /dev/sdc
    [6:0:0:0] disk Generic USB SD Reader 1.00 /dev/sdd
    [6:0:0:1] disk Generic USB CF Reader 1.01 /dev/sde
    [6:0:0:2] disk Generic USB SM Reader 1.02 /dev/sdf
    [6:0:0:3] disk Generic USB MS Reader 1.03 /dev/sdg
    [7:0:0:0] disk SanDisk Cruzer Micro 8.01 /dev/sdh

So the node sda is there and the physical disk is being reported correctly.
sda1 is not seen in gparted and fdisk -l doesn't show it up either.

   mke2fs -n /dev/sda1 returns:

    mke2fs 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
    Could not stat /dev/sda1 --- No such file or directory

    The device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly?

There is obviously something wrong with the disk which I'm going to replace but I would like to get the data from /home if at all possible. This isn't a raid disk or anything fancy just standard ext3 with 1 primary partition / and an extended partition containing a swap partition. Any help from the ALUG Community in getting me to my data would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
BJ