Recovery of files/dirs from formatted ext2 partition

Hi all,

I did quite a bit of google-surfing, but didn't see anything
specifically addressing this question:

I would like to recover some files (actually whole directories)
from an ext2 partition that has been formatted over.
The format was performed with the intention of re-installing
to address some odd intermittent problems that turned out
to be hardware-related. After the format, a basic install was
performed, but didn't complete (because of the hardware
issue). After that, the disk has been untouched.

I hope something similar to this is the case: since the
partition is unchanged, and the file system was created
exactly as the original install had created it, and all user
data files were in the directory /opt and presumably out on
the disk somewhere beyond where the second install would
start writing its files, perhaps they're still there and accessible.

Any hope of this ? What would the approach be to
recovering these files, if possible ?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

.

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