Drive unreadable after Windows Easy Transfer and Upgrade

In preparation for upgrading XP SP3 to Windows 7 Professional, I purchased a new Buffalo JustStore -- I formatted the drive in NTSF using the Buffalo bundled software and then performed Windows Easy Transfer as well as doing a drag-and-drop of my critical files. The Easy Transfer was interminably long and took around a day. I confirmed the files had been transfered. After the upgrade, I plugged in my drive and while Windows was recognizing the drive as 'E' it was not recognizing any data. Buffalo support was not helpful. Disk Manager was indicating that the drive was RAW -- in other words, from what I can glean, somewhere along the line, the drive lost its partitions. I ran the free version of Easeus Data Recovery Wizard for a couple of hours yesterday -- it seemed able to restore some files, but the estimated time for recovering the files was showing as 331 hours. I now have Easeus scanning the drive on my secondary laptop at home -- an Asus netbook with the Atom processor and XP SP2. As far as I'm concerned, it can run for a week as long as it does it's job.

Here are my questions:

1. Easeus free version seems to indicate that it will only recover a Gig of data and that the full version is required to recover more than that. And yet the software seems to be "recovering" (if that is indeed what it is currently doing) everything. Am I to assume that after the recovery, Easeus will prompt me to upgrade before it releases the recovered data?

2. On the boards here I've seen reference to a program called Recuva which is free and claims it "can find most files within a minute. Or, set the Deep Scan to look for more deeply-buried results." Is this program indeed faster and is it prefereable to Easeus?

3. Is there some other solution, perhaps a simple one, that I am overlooking and not considering?

Thanks in advance for your help.