Recovering files that were accidentally dragged into recycle bin?

My friend asked me a question.

He was moving several large files on a somewhat older latop into another folder. He fumbled the touchpad and accidentally dragged them into the recycle bin.

Well... only 3 of them were in the bin to be restored, immediately after.

I couldn't advise him, except for getting some kind of Norton-ish tool (back in the day Norton was very successful at recovering deleted files).

Of course, that would require GETTING norton, not to mention that installing might cause problems.

In Win2k, are there any tricks to look for files that were deleted in this manner? I don't even know why the recycle bin would kill about 10 files anyway without warning.

The drive checks out OK. I have searched and looked for hidden files etc; only the 3 files in question of that size were found.

 

True. There was almost no activity - and yet no files could be recovered. Odd.

Luckily they are just headaches for my friend to re-create, not irreplacable files.