recover ext3 deletion

[Harvey Kelly <harvey.kelly@kcl.ac.uk>]

Dear All,

Oh my.  I cannot believe what I did.  

# rm -rf *

Whilst in my /home directory - I thought I was in /floppy.

I've been digging around and stumbled across recover, but seem unable 
(?) to get it to work, though I have ext3, not ext2 on the drive.  I run 
as root:
recover -a

Scanning devices...
Ext2 devices:
recover: No valid standard devices found; are you a privileged user?

If your device is not listed, you can still use it
Please enter the partition's device name

<To which I enter /dev/hda7>

Getting inodes (this can take some time)...
debugfs 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
Terminated

And I'm back at the prompt, with nothing recovered as I can tell. 
Please, where am I going wrong?  In addition to losing everything (no 
back-ups, I know, I know), a 3,000 word essay due in Monday has been lost.