Hitachi hard drive recovery

Hi all,
I was using my comp and had my hitachi external hard drive in. I changed the name of my hard drive and everything has deleted. Is it possible to recover the files, photos, docs etc without paying for a recovery software.
If I click on the hard drive now it says I need to reformat but I'll loose everything and. I know there is nothing on it right now but if I can recover I didn't want to risk it. Also it renamed itself to local if that makes a difference
PLEASE HELP