Welcome to file recovery hell, my friend.
I had a similar issue (although not as bad as a total reformat) a few months ago with one of the PCs at work. Files which were supposed to be encrypted for security were actually encrypted to death and couldn't be recovered without software.
During that time I went through almost every brand of Recovery Software you can imagine and the only ones that did any lick of good for us was:
1. File Restorer 2000 :
and
2. PC Inspector :
File Restorer 2000 was the first program that actually successfully put some files back together so we could use them again. PC Inspector was free ( a major plus since when it comes to file recovery you'll find that the law of the land is High Cost and Low Results ) and did a thorough scan that saved about 1% of our stuff and let us know for sure that a good 15% was "done".
Depending on your goals here you might want to try the free program first. From talking with friends and associates I believe that we were UNLUCKY in recovering only about 10% of everything we lost, but even if you have success in getting some of your files back, keep in mind that recovery can be an expensive and time-consuming task: compare the amount of effortyou put towards recovery to how much work it would take to just replace those files by hand, dl them again, etc.
After about a week and only 10% recovered I realized that our time had come where had we shifted focus to just rebuilding we'd actually be making much more progress than trying to recover...as painful a realization as it was to have.
In either case, I feel your pain. I wish you the best of luck and hope I've been some help.
