Going from this it tells me that whatever happened did not just stop at the first 512 bytes of your drive and probably went on to stomp over your file system’s metastructure files as well, which is why real serious heavy duty work starts to be required.
Basically think of the file system as a set of catalogs containing lists of your files, writing down their names, their sizes, and where their data can be found on the disk (usually multiple different segments). When that becomes corrupted you start to see file sizes that are not correct, file names that shouldn’t exist, and when opening files, they point to the wrong parts of the disk, giving you the incorrect data (this produces the ‘coding’ that you’re seeing instead of the expected text).
The fact that it’s come to this point, what you need to do is not have any further work done with the disk and actually engage for some professional data recovery services.
The specific service you’re looking for can be requested as “File/Data recovery from a hard drive with corrupted partitioning and a corrupted NTFS file system metastrcture”.
A professional data recovery service will have you send your physical harddrive in, and they will manually scrape the drive and recover as much data is possible. You won’t get a drive back that you can just boot up with, you’ll be looking at needing to reinstall your OS and such, but they should be able to pull a majority of your data off the old drive: images, documents, project files, etc.
Hope you get this problem resolved soon – I can’t help but ask though: Did you not have any backups? ^^;;
I’ve had a couple times where my HDDs or systems have been fucked up, and it’s always been ok since I always back up all my important files periodically.
b15sdm
23
Thanks for the help everyone. Looks like this is a job for high level data recovery people.
Just dropped off the computer to a HD forensic company and they seemed to be very confident they could get the data.
Apparantly my hard drives were setup in a RAID O fashion so they will need to get data from both which equals double the cost.
I do try and back up every month to an external hard drive but as I have been so busy lately I kept putting it off. I kept telling myself…“I will do it tomorrow” and 3 months ended up passing.
I have every single piece of data backed from till August but newer work such as artwork, models, CAD drawings of the new modular case I was working on havent been backed up. I also have quite a few architectural drawings i have been working on that havent been backed up.
I have come to the realisation i may not get my data back so am redoing the work. If it turns out they recovered it all then thats a bonus for me. They said it will take 3-5 business days so hopefully will find out then. However they are going to let me know tomorrow what the cause was aswell as diagnosis/cost. Fingers crossed it wont be astronomical amounts. He did hint it may cost approx 180 per drive depending on level of corruption/damage.
Once this is sorted im going to invest in some new hard drives. Maybe 2 x 1tb drives. One as the main drive to hold operating system and data, second drive as a daily “one click” back up drive. Then finally have an additional external hard drive for that once a week backup.
If you all havent backed up your work yey…back up now guys…back up now 
I drop my work files into my dropbox at the end of every night that I do any sort of work/adjustment of things. It’s a good habit to stay in, but I also have way less information to back up than you I’m sure.
