Undo System Recovery?

First off, I'd like to point out that I'm kind computer literate and some technical things you guys may say may be over my head. That being said, here's what happened.I booted up our Sony Viao running Windows 7 and a window popped up talking about system recovery. At the time I didn't even know what that meant, so I was like "what's this BS" and exited out of the window. Then the computer went into system recovery mode. I just thought it was doing an update of some sort, so I walked away and let it do it's thing. I at the time didn't know that while I was watching tv, our computer was erasing all of our data. When I came back, it was finished and said "restoring to factory settings". Then it set-up for first time use, pick a password, ect. Loosing our important documents is one thing, but we're super bummed we lost all of pictures of our daughters first year and a half of life. I know it's our fault for not backing up our files and we will from now on.So my question is, is there a possibility that the data wasn't wiped completely off the hard drive? Could the data just have been moved to another part of the hard drive and not be erased until that space is needed? I've tried booting up in "safe mode", but that didn