power spike just zapped my entire documents folder.
went to use recurva, which found many files, but then said ignored them all.
Why has it ignored them all? How can i see the ignored files?
For recovering from a crashed drive you should set Recuva to scan for non-deleted files.
Normally most people want to scan for and recover files that have been (accidentally) deleted and ignore all the non-deleted files that are still there so don't need to be recovered.
But when the files have become lost in something like a crash (or a reformat) they have never been marked as deleted, and because there is no deleted mark Recuva sees them as still being 'live' and ignores them.
So you have to set Recuva to do the opposite to what it normally does, that is set it to ignore the deleted files and find the non-deleted ones instead.
See this for how to do that: