Another Data Recovery thread (Photorec fails)
 

First of all, I recognize ultimately all of this pickle I'm in is of my own doing, that I've already probably made some stupid mistakes that look to have eliminated any chance of recovering this data I may have had.

I'll keep it short here: I accidentally quick-formatted a 1 TB external hard drive. I used testdisk and was messing around with the FAT file tools and apparently told it at some point to copy some files (it's difficult to tell how many; testdisk has no visual way of designating selected files) but without knowing what I was doing I rebooted. This was almost out of habit, as I had tried a few times before with the 'write' command before I had any idea about the advanced file options and you have to reboot after doing that.

Anyway, now I have a few files that copied over to my mount directory (as I said, I wasn't sure what I was doing and chose a less-than-ideal destination directory by default), but now testdisk only sees the files that copied over. Somehow I seem to have lost the ones in the same directory that didn't get copied, and I cannot find them on the external HD anymore.

I then tried photorec but I get this error after choosing the destination directory:
I've tried google but no one seems to have had this error in this particular context. So I'm a bit desparate now; I just want to know if I can fix this error or maybe find another utility that could help.

Or maybe I've just completely screwed myself over.

Just finished a deeper search. No dice.