Deleted music recovery?

Alright so my stupid girlfriend (no offense hunny) some how deleted all of the music I downloaded from Oink when she was messing with azureus. Something like 6gigs oops I checked the recycle bin but it wasn't in there. So I tried a system restore and set it back to like a week before it was deleted but that didn't recover them. What else can I do? There seems to be alot of programs out that might take care of it. But there all like $40-$60 which I'd rether not spend on this. I could also re-download everything but that would kill my ratio and probably get me banned. Is there anything I can do? Preferible free. Or am I SOL?

Thanks +karm for any help.

http//www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

I don't know how well this works. I'll be honest when I say I haven't used it. I can't think of any free software that will recover your files. However, you will want to do as little as you can to your computer until you recover the files, because the more you do, the less likely it will be that you will get the files back.

System Restore doesn't restore your own data files, it's only designed to restore system files, drivers, etc.

A deleted music file is like any other deleted file -- it still exists on the drive and can usually be recovered IF you have contained further writes to the drive. It's imperative in a situation like this where a file(s) are accidentally deleted that you [i682b030a56]immediately[/i682b030a56] shut down the system. Any further activity results in writes to the drive, which risks overwriting the areas that have been marked as available by the deletion, especially if your drive is more than half full. Just booting into the OS could generate enough write traffic to destroy many of the deleted files permanently.

Ideally you would pull that HDD and slave it to another PC (the easiest wasy is with a USB converter or enclosure), and run the undelete software from that PC. The next best option is to boot from a recovery CD that includes an undelete function. Something like Ultimate Boot CD[=http//www.ultimatebootcd.com]Ultimate Boot CD which is a free, Linux-based bootable toolkit CD that has FAT/NTFS utilities. There is a Windows version, UBCD4Win[=http//www.ubcd4win.com]UBCD4Win, that uses BartPE and Windows-based tools, however it requires you to build it from an installed Windows machine to get the necessary Windows system files it needs. If you have a second PC you might try that one and like it better.

Last resort, use another PC to download an undelete utility such as FreeUndelete[=http//officerecovery.com/freeundelete]FreeUndelete to a USB flash drive. Boot your PC (realizing even this could risk some of the files), and run the undelete utility from the USB drive.

[b682b030a56]EDIT[/b682b030a56] Now that I look at it, Ultimate Boot CD (the original Linux version) might not have an NTFS file recovery tool. UBCD4Win has several (including the aforementioned FreeUndelete) so if you have access to a Windows PC to build it, that would be a good one to use.

Note if this is a Vista machine, proceed at your own risk. Vista changed some things with NTFS that can cause your system to not boot (or boot into Vista Recovery Mode) after running some file system tools that aren't Vista aware.

The computer with the deleted music files is XP. My olny other computer (aside from other family members) my laptop has vista. I'vd barley used the xp machine since the files got deleted.

Thanks for the help guys +k

6 gigs is a lot of music, I'd cry if I lost that, so I'd gladly buy a program to get them back. It's up to you though, think about the money and or time it would take to replace that--nothing compared to a $60 program.