My external drive kept giving me the need to format before being able to use message, but having been able to recover it before (years ago), I went ahead and formatted it, making sure to have the Quick format box checked.
i ran Recuva and it was able to “recover” a long list of files, but there was no folder structure and all the files were 0 bytes, so they weren’t really recovered. What do I do now? Try again?