I have a friend who is a photographer and had a bunch of pictures on his hard drive that he didn't have backed up. He got a boot sector virus. He has Windows XP restored the system to the "last known good". If he had talked to me before I would have got all the pictures off of the hard drive by making it a slave on another computer before trying anything like that. Anyways he lost all of his photos. So what I'm wondering is if they are really all gone or is there some chance of being able to recover the files. I've heard of criminal investigators who can recover supposedly recover deleted files from people's hard drives and wondered if that was really possible and what I could read to learn such things. Does anyone here know about this?