zigwig

Hi, please can you help me. I am new to this site and was hoping that someone may be able to point me in the right direction on how to recover my pictures/data from my hard drive following a Windows XP re-installation. I have a HP Pavilion laptop (around 5 yrs old) just before Xmas my Laptop would not start up I had a black screen saying that windows could not be found or was corrupted, I attempted to repair the system using the original disc but failed and then re-installed windows and have therefore lost all personal data. I have had a look on-line but help centres need you to send away laptop for repair, was hoping that I could get help on-line to find the data that is stored on hard-drive.