I recently found myself in a situation where some pictures, that to me were priceless, had been deleted from my camera memory card. Unfortunately those pictures had not been moved or copied to any other media. Like most of us I wanted a free method of recovering them. I found a software called Recuva, which is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses! [more]
I download the program and installed it to my USB thumb drive. It installs as a simple .exe, which when ran opens a simple little GUI that allows you to scan any drive, filtering by pictures, music, documents, video or show all files found. After it finds the files you select them from the list and recover them to the location of your choice. I was actually able to find pictures deleted off the memory card over a year ago.
If interested you can download and read more about it hear. http://www.recuva.com/