if only you had posted here before reformatting. For future reference, if this happens again, you can remove the hard drive from the machine and make the drive a slave on another machine, then you can copy off all your stuff.
I have seen stuff recovered before from a formatted drive (did you use the quick format util on windows install ?), but I dont have the utilities to do it. Bongo ?
Pray to god that you used the format tool that likely came with the laptop? This won't actually erase all the sectors on the disk it just wipes the allocation table. This table is basically the contents page, or the index that tells the computer what file lives where on the disk (laymans terms the data is still there, the computer just doesn't know it!)
If you used the DOS style format, where it takes about an hour to format the disk, it is doing a full wipe. However the data can still be recovered in most cases as the magnetic information can be residual. (This is why if someone deletes illegal stuff, like dodgy porn and overwrite it thinking they are safe from the law, the police can still find bits of it if they are clever enough)
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