Ran a routine cleaning last night (including wipe MFT free space) on my Dell Inspiron Laptop. Started the cleaner before bed, and then had some errands to run this morning. When I finished running errands, I went to my computer to put the finishing touches on a paper that is due Saturday so that I could concentrate on studying for my Calc II final. The CCleaner screen was still up saying the cleaning was complete with the usual list of deleted items displayed. I tried to "x" out of CCleaner, but it wouldn't close. Also, Firefox wouldn't open. Thinking the computer was just frozen (the reason for the cleaning in the first place) I just restarted the computer. When the computer started to reboot, it got hung up on a Dell SupportAssist screen saying "Initializing Fan...". I tried restarting again several times and each time, the computer made less progress. I ran the Diagnostic ePSA and got the error message "Hard drive 0-0-0 - DST Short Test failed ; Error Code 2000-0151". In a panic, I tried restarting again, hoping for a miracle, and received a message saying that I didn't have a hard drive installed. Because I have a paper on the drive that isn't backed up (stupid, I know) and would take too long to re-write before the due date, I went to BestBuy and bought a new hard drive, Windows 10, and a hard drive enclosure to attempt to recover my paper. After swapping out the drives and installing Windows, I connected the dead drive. The drive still displays the usual folders, but they are all shown as being empty. The only folder I can't open is my user folder (the one with all of my files, of course). When I try to open it, it says I don't have the proper permissions. I tried to scan the drive with Recuva, but it gives an error message: "Unable to determine file system type". When I right click the drive icon on file explorer and click properties, it shows 86 gigs of used space, which is around what I expect the disk usage to have been before this disaster.
TL;DR: I used CCleaner and my hard drive had a stroke. Any ideas on how to recover my school documents?
