Filevault Help!

Hello,

I'm actually embarrassed to ask you Mac expert for your advice on this issue since I caused this mess myself.
I'm a so called Newbi in the Mac world and have unfortunately cornered myself not being able to gain access to my profile and data.

To summarize, I have activated filevault on my OSX Leopard recently and noticed an enormous growth of my disk space (of course I know understand what’s going on). After many attempts in transferring files over I made a huge mistake of deleting the Sparse (file vault image) file and never been able to log back in with my Mac. I know I know, I'm hating myself for what I've done. I've now read about Filevault and how difficult it is to recover data if the vault password is lost. I know that my data is still in the hard drive, is there ANY way I can boot the OSX in a Unix format or run it remotely to recover (restore the file from trash folder) and log back in. Unfortunately I did not set up a Root or Admin account on my Mac prior this incident.

I just want to know what are my options beside restoring my hard to factory settings!
Please Help me.
I appreciate it.

NF.

If you have the space on your hard drive you could archive and install the OS onto your computer. Then you could copy the things you want from the old system to the new one. Then just delete the rest to get back most of your hard drive space.

Option 2. This might not work, but enable the root user with the OS X disc and boot into that and see if you can fix up your regular user account issues you have. Then boot back into the regular user account. And see if it worked.

And btw you can access the root user through disk utility when you boot from the OSX cd.

You might be able to get it by starting up the mac in target disk mode (but you will need another mac or a pc with macdisk software) and finding the invisible .trash folder and dragging the disk image back. If you have another mac to hand this may be the easiest way, and I use a little freeware app to make files visible & invisible available here: http://blog.tice.de/a_software/files/InVisibles engl.zip

Thank you all for your helpful comments!! I Really appreciate your insight.
I was able to fix the problem this weekend!
Here's what I did. I booted my computer from the OSX CD as instructed above. Created a root account and rebooted the computer.
Once I gained access to the root account, I was able to install a shareware software from MAC called (Something Disk Sweep, I'll give you guys the name when I go back home tonight). The software swept the entire hard drive and found the deleted Image file. i was able to double click on the file, provided my Filevault Password and installed the image file as an external drive on the root account. I almost cried when I saw all my old data!!!
Let me know if you have issues with this process, perhaps I can provide some help with my limited MAC knowledge.

Again thank you all for your help.

NF.