General :: Recover Documents And Files From Old Installation?

I spent about a year on linux and had all sorts of very very important documents and files saved in my system. I cannot stress the importance of these documents and know that I am retarded for not making backups. We will start another thread for people to yell at me if you want. Heres the deal, XP was installed on this computer yesterday. They did a boot from disc install, deleting the partition and installing a fresh copy of XP.

Now XP is back on this cpu. My question is, is there ANYWAY long, short, whatever that I can find those files or maybe go back to my old install of ubuntu? I've heard a lot about bootloaders and whatnot but I have to get those files. I have a bunch of assignments due and need these files.