You can use any disk editor to search clusters for .doc file headers.. It's not pretty but it works.
Linux provides all the tools you need for such low level work. If it's only a couple of documents and the drive wasn't badly fragmented then you have a good chance of getting some of the data back.
I have used dd and grep to restore ARJ archives from a bust partition. Got em all
I realised that I had not saved some more important stuff so I purchased a single user licence for PC Inspector File recovery and It worked really well, found every file and recovered them into folders ready to re-arrange.