Data Recovery Help, could be a simple solution

I borked my laptop drive, basically. I was running a program that was supposed to format an external drive a certain way, unfortunately the program is a bit stupid in the sense that it allows you to select the windows drive. Which is daft i though, seeing as the program would start formatting the drive it was running from (impossible, no?).

Anyway, as luck would have it, both my windows drive and external drive were the exact same capacity and i chose the wrong one. The program began formatting my windows drive and i cancelled it just as errors started to pop up on the notification baloons. Something about system files getting corrupted.

Now at this point you would probably suggest botting up the windows installation CD and doing a repair, and thats where it gets tricky. You see the drive no longer shows up, its no longer partitioned, when i run the repair it cant find C:\. When i put it in an external enclosure it doesnt show up, only the device shows up, but it appears as though there is no drive in it.

So i could probably just format it somehow, but the data on it is quite important to me so im prepared to go some way to get it back. Any ideas? How do i get at the files? :confused:

Thanks for your help

Knoppix could help or some data recovery tool sorry never had to use one so can recommend one.

I heard knoppix only just recently started to support NTFS, that would suggest to me that its not advanced enough to have a feature to recover data from an unpartitioned/un-initialized drive.

I have just obtained 'GetDataBack' software and will try to do it that way.