I got a bad virus and had to recover my hard drive, thus losing
everything (photographs, business correspondence, music) - how do I
easily recover all of the data that was on my hard drive before?

What exactly do you mean by "Had to recover my hard drive"  did you
re-format, re-install, etc?  The effort to recover data off the disk
(and success) will depend on what state it is in.

What I mean is that I had to put the "Emergency Recovery" cd-rom's
into the computer because I was told that was the only way to get rid
of the virus.

Where did you get the information that was the only way to get rid of the virus?

What was the virus?

If the drive has been formatted you could try something like www.recover4all.com

Well if you have deleted some files or even formated your hard disk
drive try this program here
http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe
It is really easy to use and understand plus that it has impressivly
good recovery results. I had a similar problems but this sure helped a
lot.

Sounds like you need a data recovery company.  Try www.rewave.com
(ReWave Hard Drive Recovery Specialists)

Hi Tony dovale here from 911datarescue.com

Make sure that any recovery software you use does NOT write to your
main hard drive.
Get a second drive onto your machine and either boot the second drive
up as your main driver and do hard drive data recovery onto that drive
with Ontrack Easy Recovery or alternatively, use media tools, boot
from DOS and data recover onto you new drive.

But move your data recovery onto another drive.

Make sure you do data backups regularly

I trust this will be of value 

Tony Dovale
www.911datarescue.com