Hi, I have tried to restore the folders using AOEMI Partition Assistant (paid for version), and it has produced data from the drive - I have now all the original folders, in their original sequence, and showing as having their original files within. The issue is that none of the files will open in the appropriate software - e.g. Word docs, with a doc or docx extension just open as pages of rows of little boxes or meaningless characters. JPG files are the same, won’t open in any picture app/Paint etc., so presume all are corrupted in some way following the various processes.
I have attached examples of the jpg issues - each file has additional versions with odd names.
All the Word, Excel, Pdf files all have the same filenames as I would expect to see - have tried the File>Open & Repair option, but unsuccessfully.
I am at a loss really - I am guessing that the ‘Date Modified’ indicated as 20 or 21/05/2020 is significant, as every single file, apart from the odd one, across all file types has the same Date Modified showing.
I cannot recall what I did in May 2020…the HDD in question was part of the original PC delivered 10 years, a Seagate 2TB, which I partitioned and used for day to day storage and use, alongside the SSD which just had W10 and some programmes on.
The folder ‘Simon’s stuff’, which is where I stored pretty much all day to day, and older data, still shows as having 219gb of data, and 61,226 files in 3558 folders…
No idea where to go now! Any help would be much appreciated. I have no access to a Windows 10 PC, and even if I used a Virtual Machine to carry out a W10 installation on my W11 pc, still not sure that the data would be recoverable, as I don’t have the WD software to access the backup - even if
