This happens to everyone at some point… a hard disk crashes and now you want to restore some files from it.
One utility I use is Recuva.
Even if you've formatted a drive so that it looks blank, Recuva can still find your files on it.
Keep in mind that restoring files is always a bit of luck and sometimes you are just out of luck.
For more recovery tools see also:
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/top-10-free-data-recovery-software/
For the real professionals among us, I would advice Testdisk. This is more for recovering lost partitions and if you are really interesting in getting deeper into data recovery check out http://lifehacker.com/5525534/recover-data-like-a-forensics-expert-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd
I hope you will be able to recover what you were looking for.
Good luck!