Apply head to wall repeatedly

So yesterday I noticed my Ubuntu Gutsy partition was getting a bit full. "No problem," I said, "I'll just extend it over the top of my old Ubuntu Dapper partition. I moved all my own files out of that partition ages ago."

Well, not in fact true. I only noticed after Thunderbird wouldn't work for me that my mailbox was still pointing via relative link to... the Ubuntu Dapper partition. Which I'd just removed. This is more than nine year's worth of emails we're talking about.

Result: the alternative was losing virtually all my electronic-based memories of my life since undergrad years, or spending mega-hours seeing how Ubuntu's data recovery programme works. The answer is: pretty well. In fact, too well. The problem now is to sift through a few G's worth of recovered txt files to see if any of them resemble my old emails. If I hadn't just discovered a disk-based search engine, I don't know what I would have done.

So... that's how I spent my weekend. Anyone got any tips?