Reinstalled Mountain Lion in Recovery Mode, Lost All My Data

[SetMeInMotion]

So I've only had my first MacBook Pro for a few months now so I'm fairly new to the computer.

This morning after restarting my computer, it went to the startup Apple logo screen with a loading bar only to shut down suddenly.

After doing some googling, I was told to enter recovery mode (cmd r) and reinstall the OS, also being told my data would stay intact.

When trying to select my hard disk to install the OS, it said it was locked and so I was advised to partition the drive in Disk Utility so I did.

After this, I was able to reinstall the OS on the hard disk. When the installation had finished, however, it was as if I had just bought the computer. I had to re-enter my settings, location settings, apple username, etc. and everything. EVERYTHING was gone.

Maybe I just don't understand. Maybe it's still here or I need to log in differently or access the hard disk differently. I don't know. Like I said, I'm still fairly new to this operating system.

Can someone help me out? I'm hoping I'm just reading into this wrong and this isn't as giant as a disaster as it now seems.

Thank you everyone.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

As you used Disk Utility to partition and thus format the HDD, you erased its content.
As you installed OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion again, that erased content has been overwritten to an extent.

What you can try is getting an external HDD (for backup purposes in the future of course) to clone your existing OS install onto via CarbonCopyCloner (version 3.4.7 is still free and available for download here and works with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) or SuperDuper! and then boot from that
and then run data recovery software to scan your MBP's HDD (if it is an SSD or flash based storage, chances of recovery have sunk dramatically) in order to find some or maybe all of your data.
Important is, if you want to recover data, to stop using your internal HDD and prevent further data being written to it.

To retrieve files, that have been deleted and also been emptied from the Trash or are on unrecognisable partitions or HDDs or on accidentally formatted partitions or HDDs, you can use

• Data Rescue 3 - trial lets you scan for free, but recovery needs a purchase (99 USD)
• Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery - trial lets you scan for free, but recovery needs a purchase (99 USD)
• FileSalvage - trial lets you scan for free, but recovery needs a purchase (99 USD)
• DiskDrill - trial lets you scan for free, but recovery needs a purchase (79 USD)
• Nice To Recover - trial lets you scan for free, but recovery needs a purchase (69.95 USD)