EXT3 to NTFS format

I don't now if anyone here can help with this, but I'm slightly hysterical at the moment and can't think of anywhere else.


Problem:
I have had a 500GB external hdd formatted EXT3. Someone who didn't know what the hell they were doing hooked it up to a Windows machine and couldn't access anything on it, so THEY FORMATTED IT NTFS. Is there any possible way to recover any of the data, or am I just SOL. If the later is true, I may need an alibi for the night...

xposted to linux