Is there any way to recover files on a corrupted drive if I can book to Lion Recovery Assistant?

Is there anyway to recover files from a corrupted drive if I can boot to the on-disk Lion Recovery Assistant?  Unfortunately Apple replaced my screen in December and wiped my hard drive.  I restored my files from Time Machine but have not done a backup since December because Time Machine sees the computer as new.  I started trying to find a way to reconnect to the existing backup with hopes of not having to do a full back up all over again.  There are a number of files that I need from the last 2 months.
My mid-2009 17" MacBook Pro froze last night and I had to press the power button to turn it off.  When the computer restarted, it boot into Lion Recovery Assistant.  Disk Utility reported errors like "invalid b-tree node size" and "invalid record count". 
- I restarted and ran fsck overnight.  This morning I looked at the computer and it said that the drive could not be repaired.
- Genius Bar did a quick scan and said I needed a new hard drive. 
- I called Apple Care and they had me start in Lion Recovery Assistant and run Disk Utility.  Disk Utility again reported that the drive cannot be repaired. 
- I tried using target disk mode and connected the MacBook to my iMac.  The iMac can see the drive in Disk Utility but cannot mount it.
- I tried DiskWarrior from the iMac and it cannot rebuild the drive.  It does not even attempt.
- I tried the demo of Data Rescue and it could not read the drive (using target disk mode).
I realized that if I can boot the computer to the Lion Recovery Assistant then the drive is still functional (corrupted but still functional). Disk Utility shows the custom name I assigned to the partition (I changed it from Macintosh HD).
Any suggestions?

I was finally able to recover my data using DiskWarrior!
After taking my laptop to a data recovery company and quoted $449 to recover my data, I decided to try one more time.  The technician did a free diagnosis and said the drive was still functional. I explained everything that I tried.  He said that they normally use Data Rescue and recommended that I wait a few minutes after starting the application before attempting to scan.
Using another computer, I installed Lion to a 16GB flash drive and installed DiskWarrior, Data Rescue, and Remo Recover.  Remo Recover ran the day before for more than 24 hours and although it "saw" the data, the it only presented a fraction of the data I needed. I booted my laptop from the flash drive and first tried Data Rescue Demo.  It estimated 3500 hours to scan a 500GB drive. That worked out to be about 145 days.  I cancelled and tried DiskWarrior hoping that since I had purchased it, I would get some value.  This time DiskWarror did the scan and in less than 90 minutes it found pretty much everything!  It seems that it does not run properly with highly corrupted drives using target disk mode.  At the end of the scan, it mounted my internal drive so that I could preview the rebuilt directories and copy what I needed to an external drive!

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