I used Recuva after Paragon's Defragger wiped a whole folder of photos and scanned documents. Its was c. 30GBs on a 189GB Maxtor External Hard Drive II along with backups of my C drive and My Docs.
A proportion of my folder of pics are not "recoverable".
I extracted those marked "excellent" but many of these are invalid in Photoshop 5 as PSDs or JPGs and, in Word, the menu "File Conversion" opens with many different choices of text encodings, none of which will produce an openable document.
Is anyone able to suggest any way of opening these invalid or wrongly encoded files ?
I tried re-scanning the HD with Piriform's most recent version on Recuva with no noticeable difference in results.
Before I give up in disgust and re-use my Maxtor disk for routine backups, ie, recording on top of the lost files, is there any way of recovering and opening these files ? Or is there another recovery program to try ?

I am no Recuva expert but I know you want to try everything that you can.
Did you try all the options ?

Good luck,
davey