but…

• I switched back to an iPhone. A new one. Got rid of the BlackBerry. When I sold the old one, I cleared everything off because I assumed I could just restore from my iTunes if I were to switch back.
• I kept my music on an external HD which failed over the weekend. All my photos are on there, too. I wasn’t worried about the music, because I knew I had another iPod with all the music, and I could use Senuti.
• I plugged in said iPod to restore all my music, and despite instructions to hold down Command + Option, it deleted all my music.

Any advice on recovering my music? A friend is running data recovery on the hard drive, and hopefully that will work. But is there any other way to recover my music, should that not work?