Yeah, losing everything sucks. I couldn't retrieve anything on mine, even after taking my harddrive out and putting it in an external case. :sad: Oh well, life goes on I suppose...
If you don't do that stuff every once in a while, it really seems like a black art. It's not that bad to do - I'm thinking back and I've been able to recover most data on most drives that I've worked on without having to resort to a data recovery service.