If worse comes to worse, there's a Unix utility called 'dd' which can possibly make a duplicate of the drive. So that you can use this new version to pick through the files you want. It's very slow (days for 250gb), but does provide results. (even though below is a mac webpage, the principle of the process could recover a pc formated drive)
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382