Data lost on external disk drive - what to do?

[lordfkiller]

For some reason (possibly due to putting it in my checked-in baggage during a flight), I cannot open the main partition on this hard drive. The data was very important to me and unfortunately I don't have backups of some files.

After several failed attempts with different tools, the aforementioned partition is now shown as empty. Based on what gparted shows, Ubuntu thinks it is an ext4 partition, whereas it is in fact NTFS.

How can I recover some or all of my files?

Any help is highly appreciated.

[rackit]

Hiren's Boot CD has many good partition revovery tools. I know this isn't a "pure" ubuntu solution, but I've had great luck recovering NTFS partitions and extX as well.