[Techtalk] Data recovery help

[Cindy Wong]

Hi all,

I bought an external hard drive over the weekend and intended to use it
across Windows 7, Linux Mint 12, and Mac OSX Lion.  Since the drive came
preformatted in NTFS, I intended to format it into FAT32.

I plugged it into Linux and reformatted the partition into FAT, but I
forgot to change the partition type from 0x07 (NTFS) to 0x0c (FAT32).

Then, I plugged it back into Win7.  I saw Windows recognized the partition
as NTFS, but it wrote and read data fine off the partition.  So, I thought
nothing more of it, and transferred 250GB worth of data over.

The next day, Win7 decided to restart itself while I was having lunch, as
Windows sometimes does.  When I logged in again, the whole partition became
gibberish!

None of the data, not even the file structure, was readable in Windows.
 Neither Mint nor OSX could recognize the partition as a usable one, at
least not automatically.

Is there anyway to recover those data along with its file structure,
perhaps with some magical combination of mount and dd?

Thanks!

Cindy