The worst feeling.
Oh man, I feel for poor ol' Russ.
I forgot to swap my hard-drives before installing Redhat.
It's gone. Everything. Gone. For some reason, a couple weeks ago I bought a 25-pack of CDRWs ready to go... and haven't used any of them except to back up some pics and Ana's file (during her original move). All my emails for the past 8 months (since my last backup) gone. Dev work? Pretty much gone. Graphics? Passwords? Documents? Software keys? Any digital photos from the past several weeks? Gone, gone, gone.
I've been there before, and I can't tell you how many times I've "rescued" my Windows box from sure death (well over 20 times). My advice - a six pack will ease your pain. The last time I hosed my machine I waited for a full 2 days to try to fix it, and whalla - I actually fixed it in under an hour! About 2 months ago I made it a lot simpler for myself and only do one OS per machine. My condolences - here's to finding your backup.