Recovery of reformatted external hard drive

My kid accidentally plugged my external hard drive (which I use to back up my Think Pad laptop) to my new MacBook Pro and let Time Machine reformatted it to become my mac's backup disk. Now all data that I stored before in that external hard drive is lost. How can I restore it? Thank you everyone. - Gabriel.

Gabriel_Tran wrote:
Thanks guys. I have to try to save it at all cost. All of our personal data, including graduation, wedding, birth of the kid, everything is in there.
And that was the only place all that data was stored?????
Well I am sorry for your loss but whenever you have data in only one place you are destine to lose it.
Externals are for storing backups of data that exists elsewhere. Not as the only place it is stored. But hey everybody has to go through it, at least one time. And some many times.

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