Recovered files not recognised on anything

[mk4101]

I recovered a lot of .blend files and images from an unintentionally formatted hard drive while upgrading to Windows 10, but almost none of them are being recognised as their file formats. PNGs have .png at the end of them and have "PNG" as their file type in properties, but won't open in paint, photo viewer or browser, because they aren't being identified as PNGs. I also can't try to repair them in case they're corrupted because none of the image recovery programs I've tried identify them as PNGs either, and they don't show up when I need to select them in the file explorer. My .blend files also aren't recognised in Blender, even though they have the .blend at the end of their names and appear in the file explorer. This only happens with the recovered files, any new files I create with these file formats work fine.

I've tried using different recovery software, converting the PNGs to JPG, using DISM checkhealth and restorehealth in command prompt and scanning other drives the files were previously on, but none of it has worked. If it's just gone, I've lost 2 years of work. Is there something else I can do, or is this a lost cause?

Thanks in advance

[Augeas]

Is the formatted drive an SSD? If so the files are very likely gone forever.

How did you find the deleted files after a format? The MFT (assuming NTFS) would have been recreated. Did you select Scan for Non-Deleted Files in Options/Actions?

In the Recuva scan (you can run it multiple times with no adverse effects) go into Advanced Mode and look at the file header pane. Is the header all zeroes, or something else?

 

[mk4101]

It's a HDD and I found some of the files in a massive list of other ones, I'm not sure if this is important but the folder paths for most of the recovered files were just "E:/?", but the folders were found when I tried recovering partitions on another recovery software.

I didn't know there was an option for scanning non-deleted files, I'm scanning with it now, thanks for the suggestion and I'll update this with the file header pane when this scan is done

[mk4101]

The scan finished and  the recovered files still aren't recognised. There are a couple of headers that are ALMOST all 00s, but most of them have a list of different numbers and letters, though there are smaller groups of 00s in a lot of those too.

Also I forgot to mention that even though none of them are working, almost all the files say they're in "Excellent" state

Edited November 22, 2020 by mk4101
grammar

[mk4101]

Thank you for helping me but it's a lost cause. The hex values of every single important file I recovered are all messed up and while I know there are ways of recovering PNGs damaged in this way, there's no point if I can't also recover the .blend files, and from what I'm reading there's no chance of that happening

Edited November 22, 2020 by mk4101

[Augeas]

Yes, it doesn't look too good. If the file headers aren't there then I doubt if the rest of the file is there either. It's probably due to the formatting with the Win10 upgrade.

I don't know how you managed to retrieve the file names, they should have gone with the formatting too.

The excellent state just says that no other file is overwriting them, not that the file contains any data that is of any use to the user.