Short story: made a mistake of building PC for friends/family, thought that beeing a support guy is a good deal because I could work on it while mine's in pieces due to moving; they menaged to wipe the drive while I was gone...
I don't care anymore about supporting the machine...but since it was my main PC for a month I left there few moderatelly important files.
I've checked partition table/remember how it looked previously - it's extremelly unlikelly that something was written again onto this area of HDD.
OTOH: I don't know if the NTFS formatting during reinstall was quick or slow.
So I wonder...could you help in pointing out currently recommended software that might have a chance in salvaging the remains? (basically only from NTFS/ex-NTFS partition...though from NTFS/ex-ext3 would also come handy (but ext3 capability is not crucial))