How Can I Recover A Deleted Folder In Dos? (vista)?

I’m desperately trying to recover a folder of deleted documents through MS-DOS.
The files were deleted some months ago and I just now realized that some of the documents in the folder were not elsewhere or backed-up, and I also realize that there is a chance that they may have been overwritten by now. At any rate, I want to know to recover these lost files.
I entered ‘recover C:\Joe’s_Written_Stuff’ (the name of the folder) and it told me ‘the type of the file system is NTFS’ and ‘press enter to begin recovery.’ So I do and it displays ‘cannot lock the drive. the volume is still in use.’ What does this mean exactly? The MS site didn’t tell me much.
I do NOT want to format this drive, I do NOT want to buy any unerase software unless I absolutely have to. I just need help deciphering these prompts and finding a way to try and recover my folder, if at all possible. Can anyone help me out? Thanks.

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