i had a similar thing happen to me, my computer just died and i lost everything on it, it was all irretrievable too. The only important thing i had on there was all this extremely rare Elliott Smith music (about 50 songs) that i had gotten off a site years before that had since been taken down by the record labels. I managed to get it all off my ipod back onto my new computer using ipod rip, and i have it all backed up now.
It's a hard lesson to learn, and now you have learnt it the hard way. Hope things work themselves out.
