I have a hard disk, NTFS format, in laptop which says I need to recover my files now as the drive is going to fail imminently. I have put the drive in a caddy and scanned from a separate machine using Recuva but no word/excel etc. files are showing. there is a bad sector of 14 GB in the results but if I try to recover it to my hard drive (the good one) it shows as zero files and zerobytes. transferred. I can see some XML/TMP/PNG files but not many, mainly system related.
In all
The files beginning with $ are system metafiles and cannot be recovered. Recuva can 'recover' them in the sense that they can be copied to a new location, but they will remain as copies, as they cannot be reinstalled over the existing metafiles.
As far as I remenber $BadClus is a sparse file. meaning that it theoretically extends to the whole size of the drive but in fact it is zero bytes. It is not used nowdays as bad cluster control is managed by the disk controller. All this might be moderately intreresting, but is academic due to the above.
To find as many files as possible I would not enter any selection criteria at all, apart from the drive letter. Switch to Advanced Mode and in Options/Actions check Restore Folder Structure (ignore the fact that this seems to relate to secure deletion, it has nothing to do with it), and then save the lot to a folder on a different drive. As you are looking for live files I would do as you have, checking Scan for Non-Deleted Files, and not do a deep scan as this only searches for deleted files. I suppose you could check deep scan if you're desperate, on a drive of this size it wiouldn't take too long.