Piggybank; good to read you're underway with the recovery. I've had to put drives in a freezer before today in order to effect a partial recovery - although this has been due to faulty hardware, not simply a misapplied format.
I realise you're sorted now so won't go into detail but, in case it helps anyone else in the future, Linux doesn't typically use drive letters as such, and I find working with drives generally easy + comprehensive where needed. It's very simple to duplicate drives and is generally compatible with NTFS, FAT, FAT32, exFAT (typical M$ formats) along with many others. Netstruggler; the latter has sometimes been dependent upon distribution so you may have struck one that didn't have the facility, or was quite old, recent versions of Ubuntu etc are fairly universal wrt disk formats.
FP.