Restoring Recycle Bin without Windows?

mrpeanut188

Honorable
Aug 6, 2013
10
0
10,510
I have two hard drives: my normal hard-drive and my old HDD from years back with a bunch of files. I ran out of space on the second because that's where I keep all my files, so I decided to delete the old Windows folder. I wiped it, turned off computer and all was fine. Next day it wouldn't let me boot in, EVEN THOUGH I was booting from the new HDD and when taking out the second I was able to boot successfully. So I installed Linux and recopied the Windows folder from the first to the second HDD, and now I am able to boot again.

If I was able to restore the files still in the recycle bin from a Linux Live-CD, the process would have gone much simpler. I know about the $Recycle.Bin directory, but I've been told that only contains the meta files, where are the actual files stored, and even if they are partitioned, how can I retrieve them without windows?