Down loaded all my pictures to my laptop and lost all my contacts! help

Question

I wanted to put the picts from my phone on my new non apple laptop. I do not have I tunes on it yet. I plugged my phone in and it asked what I wanted to do, I said import pictures form phone, I did not select to delete after. All the pictures transfered fine. I was looking at the pictures and my phone started making funny noises (beeping lie when yo plug it in) and a small rotating circle in the middle of a black screen (like when yo power it off i think) I unplugged it from my laptop, and it went to my home screen, battery is charged, it had the bar on the top that said to tap to return to phone call. yet there was no phone call to return too. I thought that was odd but no biggie, it was not untill my phone rang and no name showed up fpor my son that Irealized all my contacts were gone form my phone! unfortunatly my old laptop died and I have not backed it up to my new one.  Did it back it self up somehow, and if so where would the data be and how can I restore it. I dont want to install i tunes and have it over write any file and prevent me from being able to recover the data if possible. Any ideas what happened? I looked in my gmail account, the only email account on this lap top and the contacts were not there wither. I have windows outlook, but it is not set up with a email account yet sonce this is a new laptop. I was just sitting down to install everything and now !!!!!

Answer 1

more info, I started going through recent call log and text history and recreating contacts, all is fine and tehn I notice that pictures are showing up with my new contacts, but not the correct pictures, but they are pictures that were asigned to contacts before, but just to different contacts. That leads me to believe that the missing contact info, or parts of it may still be hiding in my phone somewhere,
Any thoughts?