help! lost nearly 400gb on a vfat, is there a program ubcd?

[freeballer]

help me, please! I just used ubuntu to check out my partition scheme hoping to install windows correctly (ironically making sure I didn't kill anything). I used the file manager to load the file system /dev/sda3 and couldn't remove the temporary files and recycling bin..... so I used rm -rf recycler.... Next thing I knew folders not named even close were gone also I mean wtf?

I cannot find a good freeware recovery tool online, and not entirely sure which one in ubcd can be used. This would absolutely piss me off if I needed to download some of this stuff again +.+
If anybody has ideas how I can using ubcd or other please, please help.
I'm begging and nearly to the point of kissing anybody's hind end who can help here.

Any help is appreciated,
Sorry If I sound so pathetic but anybody who's been
there knows how bad it feels
Geoff

[Icecube]

photorec can do this. You can install it from synaptic in ubuntu. You need another drive to save the files to, they won't have the original filename.

http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug/ ... 00002.html

http://www.diskinternals.com/fat-recovery/

There are a lot of tools for windows (for most of them you have to pay).

Also see UBCD4win, it has recovery tools.

[Icecube]

See: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery for a lot of tools that can recover files. You need Ubuntu or another linux distribution.

[Simba7]

*sigh* Here.. Let me say this..

DO NOT USE rm -rf UNLESS YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING!!!

I've seen too many people go "Hmm.. I'll just clean up my hard drive.." and enter "rm -rf /".. Of course, they no longer have ANYTHING on the filesystem and they end up having an aneurysm after realizing they destroyed everything (including family photos, videos, etc) on it.

Of course, the wife/girlfriend usually comes at them with a battle axe and they get chopped up into little pieces, but that's another story.