I don't know if Puppy is really the easiest. If "Easy == Very similar to Windows" then I guess it's easy. However, for me, Windows is hard and Ubuntu...
Can you start the recovery mode of your old install that you were upgrading? If you can, select Drop to root shell from the recovery menu that shows...
I would try testdisk first, you seem to have started with it. The reason being that testdisk recovers partitions (partition tables), not files one by...