I finally bought a recovery program from Easus which is really good, it recovered a lot of the partition intact. All my data is back.
I put another drive into the computer, loaded XP on that and ran Easus to look at the files on the "RAW" partition.
I still have a problem with the data that maybe someone has come across before and can help me with.. I am trying to recover the favorites and emails for aol and the favorites for IE. I know they must be in the mix of raw files the Easus program recovered for me but I cannot identify them. The recovery program has them listed in groups depending on the file extension and if I knew what extension is used by IE to store the favorites I could go through them and maybe find it, replace the file in the new version of IE I loaded and so recover the information. The emails in aol also must be there, if I knew the extension I could similarly replace the file in the new aol installation. AOL says that I can recover the favorites, since they are stored on the server as well as in the PC, but when I run that program it fails. However I can get them from another computer since the favorites are stored the same on any computer, I will just have to type them in manually.
It would also help if I knew the location of the necessary files in IE, so that I replace the right ones!
Once I have all that sorted out I can format the broken drive and maybe use it again, even for a backup! See I am learning, even if slowly.