My laptop died (BIOS, apparently), so I pulled the SSD to recover. Recuva found a pile of small files and one big one ($BadClus) which apparently has my data. When I tried to recover, I got an "access denied" error. Anything I can do?
Not a lot, I think. As I see it $BadClus is a throwback to the days when the O/S had to manage bad clusters, before that job was done more efficiently by the disk controller. $BadClus is a sparse file with a nominal size equal to the partition size. However it probably contains zeroes so it compressed to zero physical bytes. In Recuva Advanced Mode look at the Header pane for this file. It should be empty, indicating zero bytes. You can't recover a zero byte file, and it is pointless to try.
Have you run a deep scan? You might be lucky (luckier) there.
I'll try looking at the header pane as you suggest. This actually was the result of a deep scan, unfortunately.
Appreciate your help and suggestions, even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear!
And you were right, header pane is blank. Phooey.