Recuva File Issues

Hello, I'm an employee of Office Depot and I had a customer come in the other day saying that her nephew accidentally did a system recovery on her PC because the screen was displaying some funky colors. Upon doing so, she lost all of her files which were important to her, so I ran Recuva in hopes of restoring her files. I did deep scans and recovered the files back to her hard drive. There's about 100,000 total files but there is a good chunk of file names that she recognizes, but the files will not open.

Photos display something like "Windows Photo Viewer doesn't support this file type" even though it's a JPEG.

PDF files display things like "Unable to open, may be corrupted, if this was an email attachment, it wasn't downloaded properly" so on and so forth.

Where do I go from here?

It's a Lenovo desktop running Win 7 Home Premium, let me know if any other data needs to be provided.

Thanks in advance!

No assistance? :(

If members could help, I'm sure they would have.

Probably put off by the 3 degrees of separation that has gone on: you, the customer and the nephew.

How is the hard drive in question formatted; NTFS, FAT, other?

When the nephew did the system recovery, was a format done as well?

I'm guessing this nephew then recovered the factory installation and any programs your customer needed (Office, AV etc) onto the drive that you are trying to Recuva off.

Then there would have been Windows Updates, driver downloads, AV updates and probably everyday usage on the PC as well?

I'm surprised if anything will be in a non-corrupted state.

If you had just said some pictures were unreadable, there are other threads on this forum (usually with posts by @DennisD that you can search for that describe using other image viewers in an attempt to open 'flaky' picture format files. But since you mention PDF's, and by extrapolation I'll guess DOC's, .TXT's etc will be in the same boat.