deleted files recovery steps to take?

[sswats]

A friends pictures in their my picture folder went missing in Vista.

I took out the hard drive plugged it into PC at work and tried recuva which got a few files back, then getdataback NTFS.

got back a lot of files. But a lot of files that came up couldn't be opened as picture files.
Does that mean those pictures are permanently gone/corrupted or is there still a way to recover them.

 

[lord filbuster]

Probably corrupted i'm afraid. If they have been overwritten with any data, even partially once, there is no way to fully recover them.

 

[bledd]

try photorec