Lost folder recovery.

I have lost the folder 'My Pictures' within the last couple of days. It does not show up in the Recycle Bin. Is there any utility that I can use to scan the hard drive for it?

 

Just use the search tool and you should find at least three copies of the "My Pictures" folder, one for each user id:

Administrator
Default
All Users
owner

Then an additional one for the Guest id if used and one for any other id's used.

Edit: I would recommend that you get Agent Ransack to do the search since the Windows search tool is rather lame, especially when searching for special folders like this.

edit2: You can also look for it manually at:
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures

Substitute your user id for "Owner. "

 

These can be used for files that are truly "missing" either because they were deleted or lost by the file system:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/welcome.htm
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

This one is only for NTFS:

http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

If at all possible, you should not use the drive containing the lost files. Putting it in a machine as a secodary drive and using recovery applications from that machine will minimize the possibility that the missing files will be overwritten by new data before you have a chance to recover them.