Attempted Reinstall but did Clean Install. Help!

I was just trying to keep my dinosaur going until I could afford a new system (within the next 2-3 months) and was getting a lot of hang ups when booting up. I used gateway recovery disks to try and repair and low and behold, i have what appears to be a virgin computer. Miracle of miracles. Needless to say, I no longer have any pic's or documents stored on my computer and when you use gateway's recovery disks there's no more "Gateway Goback by Adaptec" program. I just want to know, are my last 2 years of pictures gone forever, or is it possible to take the tower to some kind of computer guru to possibly retrieve some of these files? I highly doubt it's something I can do on my own but if you have a solution you think I should try, I'm game... don't have much to lose at this point.

Another case of "a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing" a mantra I'm sure most techies have repeated to themselves many times throughout their career.

Here's the info:
Gateway Select 950
AMD Athlon 950 MHz
128 Ram
Windows ME

Thanks for any info and Happy Saturday!