/var and /home are gone

["Jonathan Brandmeyer" <jbrandmeyer@earthlink.net>]

Due to a series of stupid mistakes, I have managed to completely delete all
of /home and /var.  Is there any way to recover?

It went like this:
/ was getting too big for its partition, due to a large cache of packages in
/var.
Partitioned out 2GB of free space for /var.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb6 (the new partition)
mv /var /var.old
mkdir /var
edited /etc/fstab to add a line to mount /dev/hdb6 to /var
    *BUT* I type-o'ed and mounted /dev/hdb5 to /var
    (dev/hdb5 is /home)
mv /var.old /var
cd /var
ls
( notice that my home directory is in there.  Wonder how.  Delete it.)
cd /home
(notice that /varish stuff is in there.  Wonder how.  Delete it too.  God
how stupid.)
init 2
Notice that syslogd takes forever to start.  Seems to freeze, but then the
system continues to startup.
GDM can't find some file under /var.
>From a TTY, go poking around.  Discover my error on /etc/fstab.  umount and
mount to see what is actually there.  Discover /var and /home are nearly
empty (only lost+found is there, it's empty) And scream.

In theory, I know that most of the files should actually still be on the
disk, but I have no idea how to recover them or if it is practically
possible.

Please Help,
Jonathan

P.S.  In case it helps, here is my HDD setup:
/dev/hdb1    ext2fs    /
/dev/hdb2    swap
/dev/hdb3    ext2fs    /usr
/dev/hdb4    extended
/dev/hdb5    ext3fs    /home
/dev/hdb6    ext3fs    /var

/dev/hda1     ntfs       /winxp (read-only)