Hm. I did this before too. Unfortunately the program I used was not free, but it worked nice: Ontrack's EasyRecovery. It didn't rewrite my partition table (since I hadn't saved it before hand), but it DID allow me to recover all (or most) of my files to another drive.
Maybe take a look at <a href="http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/">UBCD</a>. It may come with some tools for this purpose. It would help if you knew the exact locations of your partitions, then it's simply a matter of redefining them.