A 'Western Digital' 120gb drive of mine has recently become cluttered with errors (the entire drive is NTFS). For some reason, Windows cannot boot while it is plugged directly into the computer, and cannot read from it when it is connected via USB 2.0. Luckily, linux (i'm Using Ubuntu Live) can read it through the USB.

Although I have successfully copied most of the things I need from the drive using Ubuntu, something has gone terribly wrong; a folder which contained some other folders, some of which in turn contained pictures, has dissapeared. More specifically, the name of the folder is still a file, but under properties it is of type "Unknown Type" and the folder icon has been replaced by a footprint or a hand print or something like that (it's green).

So my question is; is there some way to recover these lost pictures from an NTFS partition through linux?

Any help is greatly appreciated, because i'm stumped! Thanks in advanced.

First thing you can do is to create a copy of the file you described (that green foot is a basic Gnome icon for files that aren't recognized to be any specific known format), and operate on that so you won't accidentally destroy the original file.

It is not sure you can recover the images, but there are quite a lot of apps around that can "save lost data" or, more specifically, "save lost images" (mainly jpeg format). You can get these both for Windows and for Linux; for Windows most of them only offer you a chance to see if they could save your data, and then you have to pay a licence fee for actually being able to save it. Mostly they work like 1) choose a partition you wish to look for garbaged information, 2) press a button to get the program scan the selected partition for broken data that could be recovered 3) recover if you found any.

But yet the first thing I'd do, is to check the size of the file; if it's very small it's obvious you cannot recover a lot of data from inside it; on the other hand, if it's relatively big file, about the size that the pictures were together, there is a chance that the filesystems is somehow corrupted and a recover utility (program) could save the data. Usually running the scans won't alter anything so it's safe to run a program scan in the partition where that file is, and after you get the results you'll know if the program can save the data or not. Again, there are many programs for that job, both free and those that cost, and if some of them can't do the job, it doesn't mean the others couldn't..

Also you could install ntfs-tools and try to run the fix utility that comes along them, on the partition. But be sure to make a backup of the "corrupted" data, since that might not solve the problem but make you unable to do anything else.