I actually messed up the partitions on
this HD way back in the summer. I followed the advice I got about never writing anything to an HD that you want to recover stuff from until you're ready to attempt recovery.
It makes sense that none of the state in the HD has changed since the summer, so the files are still as recoverable now (or not) as they were the minute after I had made my partition sizing mistake in OS X's Disk Utility. My (incorrect) intution, though, is amazed that they are recoverable because it feels like "the trail is cold."