I helped a friend recover his 300gb external after a 100% quick format, googled about a bit and found
Recover My Files. Its actually decent, but you need a second hdd to recover to [so you don't overwrite your old files while recovering].
Also you'll need to deal with renaming files yourself and filtering through them for gibberish [easily doable but be ready to spend time on it - the initial recovery itself will probably take a few hours]. From my experience big movies/music/picture files are easily recoverable.
Recovery specialists are rather expensive so it depends on whats really on the disc and how much time you can afford to spend on it yourself.