I was about to go to Fedex to send my hard drive, but I just couldn’t believe that this was my only option. To cut to the chase, I got all my data back!!! All thanks to Active@ UNDELETE!
Active@ is a Software Company specializing in data recovery. They make 2 tools that I used, Partition Recovery and UNDELETE, to save my files. I really only needed UNDELETE but Partition Recovery let me see my files and give me hope that a bomb hitting my room is much worse.
I also bought a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB portable hard drive. This thing is pretty sweet. It not only a lot of storage, but it comes with Retrospect which will let you schedule backups. It also has this button on the front of the drive that when pressed will backup and newly created/changed files. Sweet stuff.
Anyway, now I can get on with my life. Back up regularly. definitely a huge learning experience for me about how hard drives work.