Let’s say I used a recovery cd that was supposed to rewrite my C partition but instead rewrote 3 GB on the 250 GB D partition…

It only performed a quick format of the partition, meaning the data is there, just not in the catalog, or whatever it’s called.

Short of sending my drive to a data recovery company, since I assume the data is still there, are there any programs that can scan a drive and pick out the files for me?

Sure !

RunTime GetDataBack for NTFS (http://www.runtime.org) will be pretty useful in your case. I used it a couple of times in similar cases with 100% success. It’s really cheap for a data recovery program that works this good ! Phoenix recovery is also a good one although it’s more expensive.

Just a FYI:

I used R-Studio and it recognised several files, but could get none back. Then I used Phoenix and it worked like a charm. Thanks so much for the help!