Lost jpg Pictures...

Was trying to clean up my computer as was sick of all the duplicate photo's on it so moved them all over to my external harddrive. Then deleted them all off of computer. Then I moved them all back to over to computer from ex.hd onto WMP but realised that it was version 9 (?!) so deleted them again and installed WMP11. In doing so it deleted them from the ex.hd and now I cant find them anywhere! Have done a search on the main computer and ex.hd but no joy... :cry
Any suggestions? Not in recycle bin and not anywhere obvious. How do I do a registry search? Have I lost them forever? :cry
HELP PLEASE?
Having the week from hell with my computer and we are no longer friends...

 

Thanks. 1st one hasn't worked but will try others...
If it said something was permanently deleted is it retrievable?

 

Since it's an external drive, Windows probably doesn't write data to it automatically, which is good as far as trying to recover anything left, however, if the WMP installer overwrote the ex.hd copies they're gone. Here are some utilities from |MG| that may be useful: http://majorgeeks.com/google_search...f;S:http://majorgeeks.com;LP:1;FORID:11&hl=en
If they don't work, you can sometimes recover a few by looking for JPEG tags in empty drive space with a disk data viewer. I imagine some of these would do that, though.

Here is a similar thread, except that the pix were on a floppy instead of an hd (some were recovered): http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=158123

 

Thanks guys. Running PC Inspector Smart Recovery (Have been since posted...!)
Takes a while eh?
Fingers crossed I get somewhere. My memory is like a sieve and pictures are VERY Important to me...

 

I suggest to save yourself future headaches that you burn the pictures to a CD. I do that immediately after removing the card from my camera and before I do any editing or moving around. That way, if I screw up on the computer, I have the picture safely on the CD. If the camera card dies or accidentally gets formatted, I have most of the pictures on a CD.