I'll make this short, I formatted a drive and installed WinXP on it. I later found out that there was important stuff on it and I'm scrambling to find a way to recover any of it.
Any ideas here?

http://www.ptdd.com/datarecovery/recover-formatted-partition.htm ?

If it was a quick format, you might be able to salvage something. If you did a full format, you're ****ed.

No. For being a general ****** in other computer threads I don't think you deserve tech support.

I have never had any luck with it, but you could try Recuva - http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Also stop using the drive if at all possible, but yea you are screwed if you did anything other than a quick format.

Would that really matter? The only real difference in a full format and quick format as far as Windows is concerned is that a full format also scans the disk for bad sectors. I wouldn't think that would erase any data.

(XP's formatting at least. Vista and 7 do write 0's to the disk during a full format, but that's functionality that was new to Vista, so assuming he used XP's format tool in the installer, that wouldn't apply.)

Really? I assumed it zero'ed it, seeing as how that's the point.

Uh yeah, both in XP and Vista/7, quick format simply marks the partition as formatted. A full format doesn't scan for bad sectors, it zeroes the drive. I'm 99.9% sure about this.

(XP) The only difference between a format and a quick format is that the full format also runs chkdsk. KB302686

That explains all the drive zeroing tools.

I stand corrected. Who'da thunk it'd be that stupid.

Also, 99% of chkdsk is a waste of time. (The first part is a fast fsck, the last part is a low level drive scan... but all hard drive controllers made in the past 16 years automatically remap defective sectors.)