Help! Akai data recovery

[neiltrackingstation.com]

I have a small recording studio with a pair of Akai DR16's as the main recording machine. Recently while editing one track on the master machine, the slave wiped out tracks 1-9 at the time of the command, and crashed. When I restarted the DR-16's, the tracks on the slave were still missing. I had not backed up this song (mistake #1). A fellow engineer with an elaborate Cubase/computer based system said that he thought he could recover these tracks with some nondestructive software. So I let him take the hard drive (mistake #2) because I was feeling desparate about the missing data. I worried about this decision all night long and called him first thing in the morning to retrieve it. I had a mix session booked that morning using other songs recorded on that drive. My friend said his program didn't read the files so he did nothing to the hard drive and gave it back to me. When I hooked it up to the recorder it gives me the message that the hard drive has not been formatted. I had to cancel the session and tried to figure out what to do. My friend down loaded a program called Easy Recovery (nondestructive!) and my PC worked all day on reading this hard drive. When it finished it definitely had music data, but it was bits of different tracks put together; unusable. My proceedure has been to back up projects after all the tracks are recorded, (mistake #3, now changed), so I have valuable recordings on this disc that I would really like to recover. Is there any way to retrieve this info from this drive or any facility that can do it. Time is of the utmost.

Thank you, Neil. The Tracking Station, (520) 439-4387