In far too many cases, simply mounting the drive on a linux system (a live usb or livecd works great here) will probably allow you to grab your files for transfer elsewhere easily - you'll want one with ntfs-3g support, which most common distros have. For some reason, i've been able to read disks that won't mount on a windows system with linux without any issues. After that reformat and move the data back in
If that fails give testdisk a run following their handy step by step guide - it searches drives for data and often can undo a basic format, or other drive issues.
You wouldn't want to format it, and you'd want to consider doing a full backup if you want to run any potentially destrictive recovery methods.