A Desperate Search for a Lost File

i fear that all hope is lost, as it probably is, but i thought i'd post here as a last resort.
basically, i recently formatted my macbook pro's HDD to dual install OS X and a certain Linux distribution (which, as it turns out, was not necessary - but alas).
i backed up everything i needed except for a 10MB AES encrypted .dmg file that i had stupidly hid away.
before i realized that it was gone, i went ahead and installed both operating systems on the formatted drive, along with many gigabytes of software (as of this writing i've used 64GB on my OS X partition alone). the total capacity is ~186GB in base 2.
i've tried filesalvage and data rescue III - filesalvage does not seem to support .dmg files, and data rescue found five disk images, two of which were unmountable (and probably too small to be what i was looking for -- less than 100KB) and one was around 93GB.
could these results in fact contain what i'm looking for, but be corrupted and/or end in the wrong place on disk (particularly in the case of the 93GB image) because of overwriting etc? is there a way, knowing some of the contents of the single Word document in my lost disk image as well as the password, to probe the drive for something resembling its data? until i find an auxiliary drive that can hold 93GB, i cannot examine the 93GB disk image because data rescue insists that i not modify the salvage drive.
i'd be willing to go to great pains in an attempt to find this file (i.e., write my own program to search the device for suitable patterns if anyone knows how i might go about doing that), so any suggestions are welcome.
P.S.: i post this in the unix section because i'm not sure where else to put it; feel free to move it

i suppose i am still in the denial stage of grieving. is there no chance that the disk image exists in the remaining free space of the drive? i mean, if i've only written over roughly a half of the drive's capacity, there should then be a roughly 50% chance that part of the data is there, right?
couldn't one of those anomalous disk images be the beginning of my lost file?
i really just don't want to accept this loss right now. is there absolutely nothing to be done about this lost file?

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