When you format a drive, you are generally just installing a file system infrastructure. This will overwrite some things and not others. Then, when you install an operating system (or anything else) you overwrite MORE stuff.
Thus---the answer to your question is: some, maybe.
Tools often recommended here are Photorec and Testdisk---I have used only the former.
What are the parameters: hard disk size, number and size of partitions, how much space is used by Windows, how much data was on there previously? etc. etc. etc.
(The more detail we have, the better the odds of helping.)
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