I found out that my entire music folder on my computer got deleted somehow, and I'm rather upset because I had some rare songs in there. I'm trying out a utility to recover deleted files. However, it's unfortunately unable to restore the folder and its entire contents just by finding the folder alone (but at least it IS detecting the folder, so that's a good thing at least), so right now I'm forced to attempt to remember every single file I had in that thing and restore them one by one, which is pretty much impossible. I'm currently using Restoration v. 2.5. Can someone suggest another freeware utility that can restore entire folders? Thanks in advance!

Back a long time ago one of my hard disks went wacko and this software saved my @$*.  I don't even remember the specifics of my own hard disk problem from back then so can't say for sure if this will solve your problem, but I recommend giving it a look.

http://www.restorer2000.com

What about a harddrive that just stopped working one day - do you think restorer 2000 would help with that?  My wife lost alot of files having to do with her father that passed away a little while ago.  I know I would eternally be in her good graces if I could recover at least some of that stuff.

If it's due to a hardware failure, probably not. What you can do is send it in to data recovery specialists. It's not cheap--I think in the best-case scenario it'll run you a couple hundred dollars--but it might be worth it if the files are that important.

Yeah, I've looked at those data recovery specialists, and I don't necessarily have that much money to recover a few files.  The only data recovery people I've seen are $600+.  Maybe one of these days when money isn't an option... (I feel bad saying this because she wanted to get me a PS3 for graduation... *sigh*  I guess there's no real certainty to it, and I'd hate to give someone $600+ for an attempt to recover lost data.)

If your harddrive is indeed dieing (random disappearing files, Windows bluescreening with kernel dumps for seemingly no reason) the safest bet would be creating a clone of the harddrive on a new empty harddrive (which needs to be at least the same size). Put the new harddrive into your computer, get Knoppix, burn it to a CD and start the live system from it. During the startup note the names of the two (the faulty and the new) harddisks (they are usually called hda, hdb, hdc etc. for IDE hdds and sda, sdb, sdc etc. for SATA/USB/Firewire hdds). After the system finished loading start Konsole (black screen on the dock in the left bottom corner), there enter dd_rescue /dev/faultyhddsname /dev/newhddsname and wait a couple hours depending on the harddisk's size. Once it's done you can safely turn of your computer again. As the resulting disk is a perfect copy of the old one you'll be able to put the new hdd in place of the old one without Windows noticing the difference (also works great if you just want to replace old small & slow hdds with newer bigger 'n' faster hdds without needing to reinstall whatever OS you use).

I've had success with Drive Rescue before. It's pretty simple to use and the price is right.

If you just can't boot off it (i.e., Windows doesn't start), you could hook it up to another computer as a slave drive and the files will likely still be there. Could you give us any details on how/when the drive stopped working?

If the drive doesn't spin at all, it's probably a hardware problem. In which case, you could always try freezing it: ttp://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

I don't mean to be harsh (as data loss sucks), but hopefully this is reminder to Schala and everyone else on the forum to backup their data regularly.  Hard disks will fail eventually, and if you have data you care about, you should back it up (via CD-R, DVD+-R, hard disk, online, etc.). 

I work in IT and I often have people come to me in Schala's situation, and I always ask them why they didn't back up the data.  Usually, they say that they "never though it would happen to them".  I'll make a crude analogy and state that not having a backup increases the change of data loss as much as having promiscuous unprotected sex increases the change of STD infection.

Still, I sympathsize with your situation Schala.  Good luck restoring your files.

I backup my data regularly.  My wife, not so much.  And, come to think of it, her harddrive was a little old.  I'm going to try that freezer method (thanks shdwrlm3!!) and we'll see what happens.  Thanks everyone!

No offense taken. I'm actually really annoyed at myself because I bought an external hard drive LAST YEAR for the very purpose of backing up after CDs got too small for me, but I never set it up. My Xmas project this year will be to do that. ^_~

In any case, thanks everyone for the help. ^_^ I managed to recover everything I wanted to, while letting go of a bunch of other stuff that I'd really had no use for. I ended up using a combo of Restoration (not that great because of its limited search function and no batch-recovery that I could find), PC Inspector (not so great because when it didn't seem to detect most of the actual files, but afterward I found some user comments on how to use the prog that I wish I'd read beforehand...the built-in instructions stink), and UndeletePlus (really good, can batch-recover files, but doing the initial drive scans took me at least an hour), just to make SURE I was getting everything. Also working in my favor is the fact that I usually don't use up HD space too much too often.

So yeah, it took just about all day yesterday, but I got my data back. ^_^