I actually lost all of my coins - I really did. I have no idea how to recover them from the hard drive. I tried keyhunter - that ran for about a day and I finally stopped it. And Photorec found 1mil+ files - but of course I have no idea if any of those are the wallet.dats because the file names are changed. Guess I'm just SOL. On a good note, I found an older version of website file so I spent the day rebuilding it. Still not back to where it was... but I'd rather that than having to start from scratch!
I feel your pain because I lost some coins like that. I gave up after the best part of a week trying to recover the files.
I'm hanging in there!!! I'm just glad I have my site somewhat functional. Now it's time for the grueling task of downloading new wallets... and setting up p2pools for those. Hell, I created a script to help me auto compile wallets and create files... it'll take me longer to rewrite than if I just do the deed of downloading again... what can ya do, ya kno!