My hard drive removed from a laptop no photograph files left can I recover them?

Question

Please HELP with advice someone if you can. I had a white unibody laptop which was snow leopard but upgraded to Lion. A couple months ago my daughter splashed a small amount of water on it whilst it was unplugged when I was working on it. No apparent damage but the battery was low. Later after I forgot about the water splash I (stupidly) unknowinlgly plugged into a power source but it must have 'blew' as it never started up. I may have tried a few times after trying to power up, including holding down power key for a good while but nothing dead.. kaput.
A few weeks ago I got myself a new laptop, with mavericks on it. But I really needed my data off old laptop, so I took it to a simply fix it  store who do apple repairs, and they took out the hard drive and put it in a case that could be plugged into my new laptop. I got it home and tried it, but it would not open iphoto obviously because, different system/update issue ect. SoI searched to see if i could find the photo files maually but ll I could find were a few files from my documents. Everything that was on the desk top, music and photo files were missing!. I took it back to simply fix it and they said that they searched everywhere and tried booting it up on an older sytem but they could not find any of the files that were missing.
I am gutted, as all my personal photos of which I never backed up are gone. I really need /want some of these pictures back . Does anyone know what may have happened? The guys at simply fix it said , all they done was removed the hard drive, and encase it. They never moved files or anything. Is it possible they may have been damaged with the water and plug into electric? Or could it have been me trying to start it up after water damage and I ruined part of hard drive.
The rest of my applications and documents are all ok, its weird just music , desk top, and photo files gone.
Is it worthpaying for a data recovery which simply fix it will charge me £100?
Any advice much appreciated. Sorry I cant tell you what sytem my old mac was as I dont have the hard drive with me to find out it was bought in Jan 2011 new white unibody snow leopard.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi Again, Well I found Carbon Copy Clone on my old hard drive so I didn't even need to download it. I just dragged it onto my desktop and I did as you said.  Using CCC and within the folder of users which has my folder of old hard drive there now shows a file called.autodiskmounted (whatever that means) and then it has a version of my hard drive below that called hard drive 1, which has nothing, but above both of these folders, there is a folder with an old user name which shows up empty on the hard drive when I search it, but actually shows lots of folders on the CCC. So without getting too excited, it lists some folders and amongst them are folders I cant see normally in the old hard drive, like my safari settings and favourites, and movies music and pictures. However in the movies pictures and music folders I can only see a  blackish square that looks a bit like a blank screen with the text.localised after it .
Does this mean anything to you / Is there  apossibility they may be there? When I selected my new laptop as the destination i got this message below so I did not proceed any further as I'm not sure it will back up the files I need..
To avoid system instability, CCC has applied a filter that will exclude system files from the backup task.
If you would like to restore your Mac OS X system files, restart your computer from the backup volume and try the backup task again.
If you are trying to restore a single item or folder, click the "?" button for additional suggestions.
Is it worth giving it a try? Thanks for this btw, its further than I've got before!!