Hi guys.
It isn't that no ones bothered with your problems, a lack of replies means that none of the guys who've been into the forum since you both first posted have a constructive answer for you. That just seems to be the way forums work. You never get a host of replies saying "sorry, can't help" as it's the accepted norm that non helpful replies aren't made.
We're all just volunteers (including moderators) who have no affiliation with Piriform, and provide help based only upon our own experience and what we learn from each other.
And when it comes to file recovery I'm afraid there just aren't any simple answers to questions like yours. If there were you'd have them by now. Once you've recovered your files, the state they're in is in the hands of the gods.
@ES44AC
The usual reason why files won't give a preview is because they haven't been recovered intact regardless of what condition the recovery program says they're in. And there isn't anything we could suggest to make a difference with that.
The biggest problem in my experience is fragmentation. It's very difficult and sometimes impossible for recovery programs to recover all the separate parts of a fragmented file, and I do know that most people don't start new batches of photographs (for example) by clearing and formatting the card to enable a clean fresh start.
The very large High Capacity cards used these days will probably always have some files on them and users don't seem to be aware that more and more file and free space fragmentation is happening all the time on those cards, resulting, in the event of a minor disaster, with fragmented files which are difficult or impossible to recover intact.
You will sometimes get a preview, but what you're previewing is the recovered thumbnail. Other parts of the file may be missing.
If the card or drive is being scanned and you can recover some files, then your achieving a lot more than some people can with more serious recovery problems, and there isn't anything we can tell you to improve on that except to suggest that the user try different settings within Recuva, such as check all the boxes in "Options\Actions" or at least the last four boxes, and to try a "deep scan" which you say you've already tried.
Try everything. Normal scan, deep scan and different settings. Short of that, I would also suggest trying other freeware recovery programs to eliminate the possibility that they will do what Recuva isn't doing although Recuva is probably the best of the freeware programs available.
A few freeware alternatives are mentioned at the end of this post ...
http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=39946&do=findComment&comment=242629
@ ripa
Firstly, always start a new topic of your own as your problem isn't the same as the original posters. And secondly, are Excell files .xml or similar (never used it) as it is apparently possible to repair a corrupt .xml file. See here ...
http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=40170&do=findComment&comment=244136
We do care guys, otherwise we wouldn't give up our free time, but we just don't always have an answer for failed recovery issues.
You could of course purchase Recuva Professional, available here ...
http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download
... which wouldn't give you better recovery functionality, but would give you direct support from the Piriform Development team.
Hope that helps.