The free file recovery utilities suggested can work. But they're not as good as the Norton Utilites file recovery program. If you lose files, you must stop any process that might write more information to that HDD or partition. If no more saving files & other writing to the disk has occured then that will maximise your chances of total success in file recovery. Many people make the mistake of saving more files to that particular partition & thus chances are that such action may have overwritten the skeletons (mappings) of the deleted files. A fragmented drive may also contribute to this, if this extra file writing to drive happens.