How To Successfully Recover Music Files

Recently the external HD with my complete iTunes library crashed and could not be repaired/accessed. Fortunately one of my children had a copy of it - but had deleted a substantial amount of classical music that did not interest him.But after the deletion his HD had only been used to play the songs, nothing was added or edited, so I thought it would be easy to undelete or recover 'my lost music'. My first disappointment was that the good old UNDELETE command in MS-DOS no longer seems to work in Windows 7. Correct?I found Windows 7 information that deleted files can be recovered with the 'previous versions' option, but for my music no previous version could be found. Or did I look the wrong way?Then I used three different file recovery systems: minitools data recovery, file recover, recover my files.

All three found tons of files (90% the same ones), but hardly any usable music. Most was crap - and you can only find out by testing each individual file.First of all, the files names were often not the songtitles, but something like $BN76GTP4A. If a property field contains a song title and/or artist name and/or duration, it is often the incorrect one. The file itself too is often crap: it starts in the middle of a song, then after 10 seconds switches to a complete different piece of music - and so on. Unpredictable result.I always thought that recovering/undeleting data from a 'non-affected' HD was easy as drinking a cup of tea. Apparently not. Where are the days that it was enough to run MS-Dos > Undelete and find ALL deleted files complete and unharmed, with only the first file name letter replaced by _ or $. Those days seem gone. Why?