Can I restore what was erased in Disk Utility?

I am still learning how to use my Mac, so please bear with me.
I have a Maxtor One Touch III that has ALL pictures of our kids plus any other important document you can think of.
We had a second hard drive that crashed last year and they are sending me a new one, but I've lost that data. So for now this Maxtor has everything on it with no second back up.
The problem was it was not working with my Mac. So I opened up the Installation CD instructions and it said to go do something in Disk Utility. I know nothing about this so I just followed the directions.
It told me to go to Disk Utility, select the hard drive and click erase. And 2 seconds later it appears my entire hard drive has been erased.
Please someone help me and tell me that all my data is not actually lost
Thank You from a Mac newbie...

If you haven't used the drive and are willing to spend some money on recovery software, you may be able to recover the files. See:
General File Recovery
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive.
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.
When you perform a quick erase as you did then all that is actually erased is the volume's directory. The files are still intact on the disk's media. Recovery software can locate them and restore them to another drive. However, if you use the drive after erasing it, then new files will overwrite the space occupied by the old files making the old files unrecoverable.
In the future you should ask before doing something you don't understand. Or have lots of redundant backups.

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Can I restore what was erased in Disk Utility?

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