Missing pictures

Hello,

I had a whole folder of pictures saved on my computer. There was recently a problem and my PC crashed. I had to use the recovery CD to make it start again. Now that the laptop is working, I cannot access the folder and it shows that the folder is empty. But, the space on my hard drive is still the same - the folder was around 30GB in size and it is still taking up that amount of space. I've tried the solutions suggested above, but none of them have worked for me. Can anyone please help out?