HELP!!!!!

Long story short.

MORONIC Sony Service Centre went and formatted my laptop for me, WITHOUT GETTING MY PERMISSION.

My precious photos are inside, some data from my research, music that I painstakingly ripped and catalogued, basically 2 months of my life are inside that hard disk.

Techies out there, please tell me, if there is any way to recover the data within. My OS is Windows Vista Home Premium. I think they performed a system recovery on my harddisk which restored it to factory settings. The data should still be inside the harddisk right?? Just that there's no way to read it?? Is there any software that I can download to extract the data?? Should I not touch the harddisk now for fear that anything will be overwritten??

I am as desperate as I sound. Help.