Beso,

thanks for the links, I've already started reading. I've also got a new
drive to copy the recovered data (if any, cross fingers...)

Most of the resources I've read up to now imply that e.g . /dev/sdc1 is
detected and a 'bad superblock' message displayed when attempting to mount.

In my case the kernel is unable to detect /dev/sdc1, after the long list
of read errors below it ends up with only /dev/sdc.

Does this look like superblock issue, or something worse?

thanks,

raffaele