Have you ever tried mounting a partition that you exists but you get this error?

mount: /mnt: can't read superblock on /dev/sda1.

The superblock in this example was bad because the physical disk had corruption and bad blocks/sectors.  However, the data was generally accessible and you can always try this trick below (with caution and no warranty).

This is specifically for filesystems that place superblocks in multiple locations, which makes the drive accessible.

Run the mkfs for your filesystem, in this case it was ext4 and pass the "-n" option. 

mkfs.ext3 -n /dev/sda1

*Do not forget the -n above or you will destroy the partition.

Then you'll see the prompt below, once again make sure you used -n

       -n     Causes  mke2fs  to not actually create a filesystem, but display
              what it would do if it were to create a filesystem.  This can be
              used  to  determine the location of the backup superblocks for a
              particular filesystem, so long as  the  mke2fs  parameters  that
              were  passed when the filesystem was originally created are used
              again.  (With the -n option added, of course!)
 

Hit y to proceed as long as you're sure that you used the -n flag.

mke2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
/dev/sda1 contains a ext4 file system
    last mounted on / on Wed Jun  8 11:40:24 2022
Proceed anyway? (y,N) y

Then you'll hopefully see a list of superblocks as below:

ext2fs_check_if_mount: Can't check if filesystem is mounted due to missing mtab file while determining whether /dev/sda1 is mounted.
Creating filesystem with 120038912 4k blocks and 30015488 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 91fcf16a-7f97-47cf-82b3-654d7dca6d70
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
    32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
    4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
    102400000


You can try any of those locations, if the disk is badly damaged you may need to try a few different superblocks.

Here is how you would mount with one of the superblocks above.

mount -o sb=4096000 /dev/sda1 /mnt
 

The -o sb= is where we plugin one of the superblocks we located earlier, and I used one of them from 4096000. 

Hopefully you can access and recover most of your data if this happens to you.

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