General :: Bad SSD On A EeePC - How To Recover Files

I'm trying to recover a lost partition from a faulty SSD . I've used Linux last time, hence I'm a bit rusty. Still I'm trying to recover a damaged SSD filesystem on a eeePC 900 of a friend of mine ...Here are the details.

Asus eeePC 900

- 4GB primary SSD (OS is installed in here and works fine)

- 16GB secondary SSD (this one is faulty; after a few weeks of problems this friend of mine made some sort of system restore, but Linux couldn't use it correctly and trashed it away with all of it's data ... he couldn't explain it better to me. I'd like to recover the files from within this SSD)

Here's what I did on the eeePC:

1) fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 16.1GB, 16139354112 bytes
...
/dev/sdb 1 1962 15759733+ 83 Linux

[code]......

I'm trying to find out the right words without generating any inflammatory answers from the community ... I currently kinda have only a Windows Seven installation available to work with ...

If you're still with me I add a few more details. That's all been done on the Win machine.I've managed to load the sdb.img file with Gizmo (it's a little software that mounts img files). Gizmo couldn't load the sdb1 partition inside of it but ... another program called PhotoRec managed to access the mounted disk, found the ext3 partition inside of it (gave me a few errors though) and successfully recover a lot of files :-) Well, a lot, not all of them, and not every recovered file was good That's a first improvement, that tells me sdb.img actually contains valid data even if only partially valid. I don't know if PhotoRec is to be blamed for the failed ones or the SSD image file did not contain enough valid data to let PhotoRec do a good job.

Now I would go back to Linux. I'm well aware that Linux has more potentials than Windows when it comes to handling disk images, loopback devices and so on; but, as I already said earlier, I'm a bit rusty.I'm willing to make a fresh installation of Linux (maybe Ubuntu) on a spare harddisk in order to get full advantage of that and dig deeper but I need directions when it comes to recover that lost partition. I'd like to try and recover the entire partition (not only a few files), maybe rebuilding the ext3 superblock or whatever.Here I'm lost, I don't know what has been developed in the last years regarding partition recovery in Linux, what tools are available, which forums deal with such techniques, I'd like to be pointed in the right direction.