Out of curiousity were the pictures all right protected, not that it should have made a difference to the various programs used to delete them.
If this was mentioned i missed it due to partial blindness from all the tears of laughter.
Personally what i would have done if i was having that many disc errors, is just have that drive connected to the mobo, reinstall windows fixing any disc errors, install Partition Magic delete any other partitions so their is only one, change it to logical, then reconnect the other hard drives, reinstalling windows if necessary then using something like the Eraser program to zero fill the hard drive, after deleting all the windows file first.