Thanks to everyone who's written in with suggestion about how to recover the data from my personal hard drive Chernobyl. I tried some that didn't work. And I tired this program called GetDataBack and it was mildly successful, restoring something like 83 gigs of stuff. The problem is that there was over 230 gigs on the drive. That's just not good enough. I talked to one of the several computer geeks in the ski house and he assured that the program he has, which cost 600 bucks and was purchased at the best of one of his clients will be able to recover 100% of the files, so I have my fingers crossed. I bought a new drive to replace this piece of shit I have, and with any luck, I will have all my files back in the next week or so.