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Yes, just don't aim for onehundred percent recovery. This unfortunately is not an uncommon topic. Try searching LQ for terms like "recovery" or "undelete" and tools like photorec, foremost and Live CDs like HELIX and KNOPPIX.
In short: a filesystem structure consists of superblocks, reserved inodes, inodes and data blocks. "Formatting" means overlaying a partition with a (new) filesystem structure. However formatting does not necessarily mean wiping the paritition area, it just overlays the structure. Therefore a group of blocks (aka a file) may still exist (where not overwritten) but they're no longer hooked into the filesystem structure, they are effectively unlinked and therefore invisible on mount. The problem with recovering files here is that not all blocks a file may occupy are directly linked. That's why OSS header/footer carvers like scalpel, foremost and photorec try their best using file "magic" to recover things.
If unsure make a backup beforehand, make sure you do not mount the filesystem as you boot your Live CD and write out recovered files to a mounted filesystem that is safe to write to.
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