Unfiled Notes ARE WIPED OUT!!! PLEASE HELP!

[JennyJef13]

Hi there! I can not describe how depressed i am now while trying to describe my problem in a couple of lines and hoping that someone would actually help me in this matter... i reinstalled my windows vista last night after having replaced my defective hard disk, and installed the office 2007 package including OneNote which i VERY MUCH rely on in every aspect of my life... i had an early backup of my laptop so i copied my files including the "My OneNote Notebooks" folder in My Documents, which as far as i remember is the place where i saved my notebooks AND all my Unfiled Notes (over 20 pages)... now the thing is that when i copied the notebooks and the .one file (Unfiled Notes) to my new documents folder and tried opening them, all my notebooks were fine, but to my shock, my Unfiled Notes file was only about 8kb and totally empty!!! i even tried opening it from the external drive where i had my backup but in vain!!! i'm in the process of trying and recover some files from my defective hard drive and even the file in my documents there reads about 8kb!!! i can't believe that my notes were not saved somewhere although i'm almost sure they were set to be saved in "My OneNote Notebooks" under My Documents! and i can't believe i've lost all these Unfiled Notes of mine!!! OneNote has always worked like magic for me so there has to be a way i can get them back right? i'm both frustrated and disappointed and all i can think of is my loss!!! :-( i have an exam in 3 weeks and my life REALLY depends on these notes!!! i'd really appreciate it if you could help me... thanks in advance...
p.s. i tried searching for *.one files but couldn't find them since i reinstalled a whole new vista i guess...