Photo Recovery - Can't See All files

[KinVA]

I have about ten years worth of digital photos on my Gateway NV79 laptop running Windows 7. The machine was frozen and wouldn't respond to Ctrl-Alt-Delete so we eventually had to power down by holding the power button. Since then I have been unable to reboot the machine. Using a separate forum I was able to get some graphics issues with Knoppix and transfer most of my files off to a USB drive. The only place where I'm stuck is with more recent photos that had been imported using Windows Live Photo Gallery. For some reason, thee folders appear but are empty. I can say that the folder names are a bit verbose, for example '6/1/2010 - 6/5/2010 - Graduation'. I don't know if the slashes or spaces could be causing an issue with seeing the full path to the photos or if maybe there is some type of rights issue. Of course, the photos may just not be there but I can't come up with a reason why I'd see the folders but not the files. The computer is under warranty, but they'll probably just swap out the hard drive and then the photos would definitely be lost forever. By the way, I looked at some of the manuals but haven't had much luck learning the command line interface so I've been using PCMan exclusively. Any ideas? I'm going to give Recuva a try next to see if I see any different results.

[hal8000]

Boot from the live CD and open a terminal and start photorec
Photorec is recovery software so there is a chance that you may get some data back. If some files have been partially overwritten then they may not
be recoverable. Here is a step by step tutorial:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step