I'm at my wits end here, it's just been one problem after another and I'm well and truly lost now. Let me explain the situation.
So my laptop's hard drive turned out to be some cheap thing and developed too many unreadable portions. Fortunately, I was able to swap out the laptop drive with one from another machine and use that (this time it was from WD - a far more reliable brand and is working well so far).
To recover my data, I bought an internal HDD enclosure which supported USB connection to read from my files. This worked and I was able to recover a few things, but when I next went to recover, it apparently needed formatting. Upon plugging it in, the old System Reserve partition shows fine, but the main drive shows this message:
You need to format the device in drive F: before you can use it.
I looked this up, apparently it happens when you fail to remove it safely, but Windows decided to update and it must have glitched out... or I've been an idiot.
To try and recover, I first used EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard which is pulling the directories, but it crashes when populating the file list view. Next I tried Recuva from Piriform and after 22 hours of search and analysis, it apparently found 0 files. Both detect ~5,000,000 files but neither can successfully recover them.
I checked it if was a driver issue, ran it in different ports and on different PCs but no success. Not sure what else to do.
Does anyone have any advice for me?
