In 2003 I recovered my hard drive with a truly awesome program called Ontrack. There's a free version that allows you to test to see if it would actually work on your drive, and then a version that costs $89 to do the recovery.

I also run an IT consulting business and could totally justify the purchase of the software to my partners, if $89 is way outside your budget and you were willing to ship the drive (I'm in the US). I couldn't guarantee that I could recover it for you, but I do have a good bit of experience with this.

Also, I mentioned running email for the Varrio Loco gangsters to my partners the other day. Dunno if it will catch on, but I am trying. :-)