Thanks Basher. I will try that. I also found
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
This didn't work well when I tried it on a windoze machine but on my F16 box, it has been running for almost 48 hours and it IS recovering files. The problem with it, is it will name the files some alpha-numeric number instead of the original filename - which it mainly does for pix and multimedia files. So for example my picture called "Photo of kids being born".jpg is now called f4434425.jpg. I am not complaining, one, because I had all my photos backed up on my hosted storage, and two, I am in a better situation with the recovered rename files then I was 49 hours ago!
What I liked about the testdisk and photorec was that it said there was not a readable partition and it was a blank, unrecognizable disk.(In windows7) & dmesg reported I/O errors when I plugged it in, although it was assigning it to /dev/sdg.
Seems like a handy tool to have around for any IT consultants/recovery/forensics type people out there.