Erased HFS+ File Table

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A few months ago, when attempting to back up an iMac of mine, I accidentally dd'ed 300 MB of the EFI partition to the beginning of the main HFS+ partition when actually attempting to dd to an external drive. This probably means that the entire main file table has been deleted (and maybe initial system files). There should be a good number of other files (I don't exactly remember what kinds; photos were all backed up already, possibly some notes in RTF, some saved tabs and bookmarks in Firefox, some Audacity recordings, etc) but the drive was not too full (about 60-80/250GB IIRC), so it should not be too fragmented.

This computer had not been in use for that long, so nothing absolutely urgent or critical was on it, but there are files that I would like to retrieve at some point. The Mac OS Disk Utility can do nothing for it. As far as I know, this leaves searching for file headers and finding a file table backup if it exists.

Does anyone have a similar experience? What software is good and reliable? Is there any hope other than file headers? Does such a thing as a file table backup or secondary file table exist? If so, is it outside of the first 300MB, and how would I read it and/or what software is there to read it? The software will also need to be able to read from an uncompressed disk image.

I am not objected to buying software, but I want to make sure that it is reliable, and I want to make sure that it can recover files.

Thanks in advance,
Kai
 

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