Who has experience resurrecting a harddrive with a seriously fsck'ed up FAT?

So I boot up my computer, and the partition I store my documents on is corrupt – dead boot sector. This is the first time I come across this problem, and the first corrupt ANYTHING I’ve ever had to deal with. So the first thing I do is run a program that can rewrite the boot sector – so what do I do? I accidentally replace the boot sector with blank information – 0 cylinder 0 head 0 everything, wrong cluster size, but hey, I got the filesystem to see it’s NTFS again. So I try recovery software again (Recuva, which is what told me the boot sector was toasty) and it’s still reading as a RAW volume. So instead of getting on sourceforge (greatest site in existence) to see if there’s anything that can read RAW volumes, I just follow some daft advice and do a quick format to completely 15-megaton-nuke the FAT. Now when I run any recovery software (which it all works fine now), everything I’ve ever deleted in the 7 years I’ve had the computer shows up, except what I need, which is everything on there before Satan pissed on my drive. To make matters worse, a program on my computer started writing a lengthy log to the drive, potentially overwriting some of the info.

Now, what I want to know – can my files be rescued intact by some daring code-monkey feat of some knight in binary armor here, or am I doomed? I had five years of philosophical frameworks, hundreds of documentation pictures, both for legal purposes and recreational, my work history, copies of my W2/W4s, and countless other priceless gems.