Hello to the whole team.

I have a problem with the 2nd hard drive (D:\ ), Ι use it as a storage disc I have all my programs and photos etc.
The disk is Seagate ST500LT012 500GB .
I have it files in it and just opened it is empty and all I see is $Recycle.bin and System Volume Information i not have access.
I have lost my files forever?
I can recover them?
Please help me

Thanks to allhttps://www.piriform.com/recuva

This tool has worked for me. Whatever you do dont format or mess with ADDING files to that partition as for that will mess with your ability to recover files. Be sure to have enough free space on a healthy drive to copy your data that is recovered to.

After your data is recovered you can run crystaldiskinfo to test the hard drives health and see if it is failing or is it was just file table corruption in which the drive might still be healthy to continue to use after formatting fresh after data recovery to an alternate drive. Future use of this drive I'd be CAUTIOUS with important data to save also in another location on a different drive to avoid data loss. Cloud storage is also available such as 15GB free storage space at Google with Google Drive. Just need to register with gmail to get a 15GB cloud for free.The problem is i can't see my files but only see the $Recycle.bin.Τhe disk is full of files.
The only way is recovery?Ι try the EaseUS Data Recovery and i find a lot of my files but the names of the folders and files are like this  o___---o__s.
Ιt's hard to make renames at 500gb HDD from beginning.
There is no other way?


DaveLembke thank you very much for your answer.recovery programs are a last clutch of the straw gamble.
if you have no backups of your data (shame shame shame) than they are your last throw of the dice.

it all depends on how screwed up your drive/data is.
recovery software tend to only read the MFT to find the first extent of a file, from there it's pie in the sky magic time.

too many factors influence your recovery changes, like, how the data was lost, drive usage, format type, fragmentation etc.

if the recovery software can get the files back, even with crap filenames, then you have to take what you can.

but give Recuva a try too, it is very popular, so one would surmise, also good.Hi

I agree with both Mark and Dave

There is some things to look at before starting a recovery. These are general things and apply to all recovery attempts.

Remembering Daves advice of not writing to the drive you are recovering which is very important.

Check the health of the drive I use HDsentinal as it works on USB connected drives so you can start windows and the HDsentinal and then quickly power up the drive as a USB device. If it detects, check it's health if it is showing as ok then it is probably safe to to do the scan for files on the original drive.
If it has bad sectors or other likely problems you should look at MAKING 1 or 2 raw copies of the drive with software or a hardware copier. Linux has DDrescue which can be very successful in coping ignoring bad sectors. 

But in this case it is most likely the drive has been reformatted. So if the drives hardware and media are ok which hdsentinal will test then you can look at the software recovery options.

Data Recovery software is as much about the quality of the software as the knowledge of the person using it.
For example Recuva is AMAZING software and it has a full free version. It is a bit harder to use than the easues and other programs but in some situations gives more detail of the condition of the files.

So the NEXT step is to investigate what you are working with.
What format is the drive currently if Fat32 it is likely the drive when it had the data was NTFS  which is good.
Is the drive set-up as GPT if so will the recovery software work with GPT drives.
How big is the recycle bin and I assume it is empty? when was it created which could show when the drive was formatted.
Is the partition showing as the full size of the hard drive (you can get this info from HDsentinal).

With the above info you can then decide on the best recovery option. A program  to look at which is  free to try , but costs to recover files is  Active File Recovery
 http://www.file-recovery.com/

I see the latest version has the HD health similar to HDsentinal so you may not need hdsentinal.

If you run a trial version of the software and post some screen shots I will happy to check and see if a better recovery is possible. 

********I have no affiliation to any of the software vendors I recommend. All advice is from Personnel experience**********