Help recovering lost data please

[Merlin]

I have a thread under read error but I found something wierd....could a virus or hacker create a hidden partition on my PC and move files to it so I cannot see them?? My PC was off. I turned it on and got the error....disk read error. The entire documents and settings folder seems to be gone. I slaved the "bad drive" and I can access it fine no problem...no documents folder. I have every photo I have ever taken of my only son on here and yet no picture appear when I search for that file type. Is there a way that I can try to recover " lost files" off this drive. Anyone who has experiece recovering lost data please help. I had a back up file but it was deemed corrupt and unusable by Windows.

[KnightRid]

http://www.file-recovery.net/

Easiest program I ever used and it works great.

Main thing, do not keep using that drive for data until after you run a file recovery scan on it or you could overwrite some of your lost files.