Hi,
If you find yourself in this stituation again, dont format the drive. Don't do anyting to it.
You can use Recover My Files to search the physical drive.
The files that you saved probably do not contain any data. Download Explorer View for Windows Explorer from
http://download.getdata.com/ExplorerView-Setup.exe. This program integrates into Windows Explorer (press the F8 key to open the preview window). If it does not recognize the file type, it will default to hex view to show you the raw content. I suspect the files may be blank.
The reason for your search results is that there is a table at the start of a dirve called the Master File Table, MFT, which contains a record of every file on your pc, including deleted ones. When you recover files with original file and folder names, this is what Recover My Files is using to locate the data.
In your sitaution, an MFT record for a file is not returning the correct data. So either:
1. The MFT record for each file is corrupt and pointing to the wrong location on the disk; or,
2. The MFT record is correct, pointing to the right location of the file on the disk, but the data in that location is not valid (it could be random data, or it could be zeros if the drive has been wiped).
If you are running Vista, then a format is destructive and writes zeros over your drive and permanently erases the data.
So when you look in the files with Explorer View, if they are all blank, then this is what has happened.
If you do find data in the files, then you should try a new search with Recover My Files (or you can try this anyway just to be sure). Run a Complete File Search on the phsyical drive for specific file types that you know were on the disk. This search does not use the MFT method, but finds files by their header and footer, so if there is still data there they should be found (but they will not have their original names [original names are stored only in the MFT] and will have names like "Recovered_JPEG_1".
Good luck. Let us know how it goes.