Recovering Data from Reformatted Hard Drive

My wifes mom has a friend at work who had some problems with her iMac. They reformatted the hard drive and lost all their pictures. The people at Apple told them it would be like $800 for them to retrieve them for her. Is there any way I can do it for her? I have never attempted anything like this but I am pretty savvy with computers and would like to help them out if I can. Can anyone give me some information on how to go about this?

Edit: Sorry this is the wrong forum. This is where it brought me when I was looking for Apple forums.

No, you cannot recover any data. They need to engage the services of a data recovery service such as Drivesavers. It will cost them more than $800, I guarantee.

Obviously if they've continued using the computer (reinstalled an OS etc) then those pictures are probably gone forever.

First thing to do is advise them NOT to use the computer. If they continue to use the computer, the space freed up by the reformatting process will be overwritten. Once that happens, it will become near impossible to retrieve the data.

You can try the software approach: I suggest trying Data Rescue 3. They have a trial version which you can download to see if it will work. If it works, buy a license. ($99.00)

Regards.

I wouldn't recommend using Data Rescue, I have tried that in the past, and it wasn't very successful with what I was looking for. I deleted something I didn't want to, and tried getting it back with that, and it was only able to save a fraction of the file, which makes it pretty unuseable.