Eeek! - Data recovery from a formatted Mac disk

Hi Folks,
Please forgive me posting what is really a Mac question, but one which I am trying to solve via Linux. My muppet house mate has just managed to partition AND format the disk in his G4 MacBook, just before he realised that he had not made a copy of a rather important recording session. We have access to another G4 Mac with Firewire support on both machines so I can get to the blasted disk using target mode. I'm not a Mac user and from my looking on the web there do not seem to be any free Mac tools for a recovery situation like this, maybe DiskWarrior 4 but that is $99.95

I'm thinking that I could use an Ubuntu PPC live CD on the working Mac to allow me to mount the formatted disk and then use Linux tools to recover data, the trouble is that I have never had cause to do this before so I'm not really sure where to start. I know I can create a DD image of the drive but how do I go about searching the sectors to see if I can find the illusive recording session my housemate needs? Remember that this would have to be a live CD environment so default Ubuntu file tools would be best. Alternatively any other suggestions would be much appreciated...

I've looked at DarwinPorts to see if I could cut out the liveCD requirement but it seem you need the toolkit to compile - Am I missing something or would this involve spending money too?

The sanity of my domestic life is in your hands....!

The good news of the morning is that we found a backup with 80% of the missing data on it. All the recordings are there, just a couple of mixes and pro tools session files have been lost. The housemate is happy enough to re-mix the missing bits as they needed a little tweaking anyway.

Moving the drive to my Linux box also crossed my mind but being a 2.5" drive and inside a laptop this was not really an option. Spending any money was also not an option although I was wondering about a bargain usb enclosure as a way round it.

I was looking at dd_rescue (why the hell he called it that when we also have ddrescue without the underscore I do not know!) which would seem like the tool to use to create the image using with the log file option seemed like a smart way to go. The bit where I was / am falling down was on the disk image analyser side. Any application names that you know that I could have a look at? I'm thinking that I should really get some sort of boot disc solution together incase my drives finally give up the ghost before I find a new job and replace them...