So your saying recoverit might work? I'll download it if there's a chance. I know the files can be read to some degree cause I was able to see them in Puppy linux as read only, I just couldn't copy paste them.

No, I'm saying Recoverit does work.  It has recovered files from 2 drives for me so far in the past few months.  1 was a 2TB SSD I buggered up somehow...and even as a non-boot drive it was messing up my system causing File manager lockups...but attached via external USB I got the data off...then did a full format...saving the drive.

The other one was just last week...sister in law's sole drive....couldn't boot as MoBo was also fried... but got data off and reformatted OK.

200% success rate so far, but as I said...drive must be at least 'seen' by the OS but even if it says 'unformatted' or 'RAW' the data can be copied off it ....and after that you can bin it...or reformat...

One important point when dealing with any attempted recovery....never delete or move anything...only copy the files found...and obviously never back to the damaged drive/file system.  Every overwrite is data loss...

Thanks a lot Jafo... I'll try to do what you said and see if I can salvage anything out of there. When its over I will post how it turned out.

I have my fingers crossed for you..... nothing worse than losing the irreplacable.

Needless to say, important 'stuff' should be on daily backup to a secondary drive...and even then perhaps weekly to a tertiary one [redundancy backup]...

So it seems to be going well initially. It scanned a bunch of stuff quick and then continued with a deep scan which has been going about 5 hours and is about 68% complete. I figured I would wait for the deep scan to finalize before trying the recovery part. It definitely looks promising.

If you end up with corrupt/damaged files, don't just chuck it. This link might be of help: 

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-tools-repair-corrupted-damaged-files-windows/

Yes, you get about 40% from the quick...but it's the slow bit you need to wait for.....

At 77% it has slowed to a trickle. I was hoping it would speed back up, but it hasn't. I keep thinking maybe I should start recovering what it has, but it hasn't completely stopped deep scanning yet, so I figured I would wait until it says its done.

That.

81%

Alright, at 90% I got a warning about many bad sectors remaining and to begin recovery as soon as possible. I paused the scanning and went to recovery.

Yes, if it's taken that long it's having issues reading each block.  Copy/paste everything it has listed to a second drive...chances are the bad bits won't have much on them anyway....