Was reading from a laptop repair workbook that I just bought from Amazon tonight, and reading the part about laptop disasters gave me an idea (which I never knew existed!) to google for info on how to recover lost files from crashed/dead/reformatted hard drives and I discovered these d/l's.

PhotoRec & TestDisk

I have already d/l all of the betas and the 2011 versions of these apps onto my mac for later transfer and backup.