deleted a virtual machine with critical data under CentOS

Hi all,

I'm in a pretty messed-up situation, hope you can give me a hand.
I deleted by accident a folder containing a VMware server virtual machine, that contains most critical information. The host OS is CentOS 5.5, which I believe by default uses Ext3.

I shut down the PC intermediately after noticing this.
Is there any chance of recovering the files? Would they be able to mount to the same or another virtual machine?

I need to get this information somehow, there are no backups.

Which software can I use?

If anyone can help me recover this, you'll get a free book by amazon, you have my word.
I'm THAT desperate.

You could try this SITE

Try this: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html