I had a problem like that when i lost my vista boot. i partitioned my drive in orther to install xp on the second drive but that messed up things. I had to do a clean install of vista.
Ived tryed lots of soft but the one that worked better was file scanvenger. it will take you lots of hours to do a search (deep search) but youll get everything back(as long as you don throug new stuff on the drive lige other data). Be prepared to have a pen drive handy so you can transfer the files back to the pen and not to the hard drive again.