to cut to the point i erased music from the recycle bin and want to know if they are still in the hard drive somewhere.if so is there a way i can claw them back somehow or are they lost forever. using a pc running win2000 professional.
They are technically still there, but you probably couldn't get them back. You would need to use some very expensive software, or send your harddrive to a very expensive data recovery company.
yep first thing you do when u want to recover is not to do anything else that will change the structure of the partition. i would run the drive as a slave on another computer running the recovery program.
That happened to me one time and the link was broke from where I saved them or something like that and it wouldnt let me get them back, needless to say I was a little pissed.