Sorry I haven't replied in a while... I have successfully resolved this issue, without the need for a professional service. I went quickly to restoring everything, without thinking of giving a reply.

So anyway, after the partition error, we reformatted the hard drive to ntfs with a fresh, blank copy of windows xp. A friend of mine that is an IT professional for miller brewery led me to a couple solutions, as well as roban. None of the ones my friend gave me worked, until I stumbled on R Studio...It scanned the reformatted hd and told me there were excel documents, word documents, that weren't on the new install. But that software was $80 to restore anything larger than 80 Kb. So i restored everything with that. But I tried PowerDataRecovery, which roban recommended, didn't restore with it but scanned that hd, and it too successfully found the old, written over files.

Thanks for the fast help. I hope that my solution will help you guys on the forum. I was amazed that a program like this can actually find files on a drive that has been written over! Not that ill want to try it again.....lol