Disk Utility erased my volume, but it said it wouldn't!

I have a 250GB external hard drive that was formatted as Mac OS X Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled). I had about 144 GB of data on it. I have used started using Boot Camp and wanted to be able to use the external hard drive when running Windows, so I thought I would try creating a FAT32 partition with the empty space. I went into Disk Utility and set it up to add a volume of FAT32 with the remaining space, and when I clicked on the non-empty portion it told me the "volume would not be erased." Excellent. So I started the partitioning process, and lo and behold, my entire external hard drive is empty! I have two partitions now like I wanted, but the 144 GB partition has no data on it. What gives? Is there a way to get the data back without resorting to some data recovery service? This isn't cool.
Message was edited by: gbuell

Well, I certainly will admit that possibility, but it seemed really cut and dry to me. I'm not sure what I would have missed. But oh well. I don't know much about data recovery - is it a "sure thing" that the files will be found, given that this just happened recently, or is there a good chance I won't get anything out of it?

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