Recovered Hard Drive Mess

My mother had a hard drive go bad swiftly. I tried to do what I could, but as incredibly bad luck would have it, I ended up having a RAID failure while I was copying files for her. Anyway, I ended up paying a recovery expert to recover the drive because I couldn't get the drive to stay connected to do it myself. I received a call back today that the drive was finally ready. Paid them the money (without being able to check it first), and now that she has it back, the data is a complete mess, unusable to her. They told me it was a 1-to-1 copy, but it is nothing like it was before. In fact, it looks like files do on a RAW setup where it has the folders for recognized file types, and then all the files of each file type are in one single folder. This makes the content unusable for her because, among other things, she needs to know the content's creator, and without folders, there's no way to know that. Is there any hope or anything that can be done to get the proper folder structure and filenames? Thanks much in advance.

It is not clear whether they have returned the same original drive with data rewritten to it or they gave you another drive with the copied data.

If it is the same original drive, then all the copied data would have overwritten the original data and it will be well-nigh impossible to get it back.

Perhaps you should have come here in the first instance and taken advice from the experts here before giving it to the data-recovery personnel.

This is on a new drive. I brought the new drive to them when starting.

So you have the original drive. Right?

Now give full details of the problem you faced with the original drive. Also state the manufacturer, model No. and capacity.

Yes, I do have the original. The problem with it is that it was going bad. The biggest problem seemed to be that it kept disconnecting from the PC (dropping out). If I turned off the enclosure, and turned it back on, it would work again for a bit before doing the same. This was not an issue with the enclosure, though, because I tried it in multiple enclosures, and others worked okay.

It is an Hitachi drive. 2 TB. I don't have the model number at hand, but if you do need that, I can get it a little later.

Sorry, I was not in station for the last 12 hours since morning here.

"This was not an issue with the enclosure, though, because I tried it in multiple enclosures, and others worked okay."

Again what exactly do you mean when you say "others worked OK"? Do you mean even in other enclosures it was the same problem that your drive was getting disconnected after sometime?

Now that I know you are putting a bare drive into an enclosure and connecting it through USB, would it be possible for you to connect it directly to the motherboard SATA port in a desktop and check whether the drive is accessible?

Apologies there. I am not doing a great job explaining. :) I tried it in multiple enclosures, where it had the same problem in each, while other drives worked normally. Unfortunately, it is not possible to connect the drive to a PC directly in this case.

Normally when assessing a drive and attempting data recovery, we resort to a direct connection doing away with the SATA to USB interface inside the enclosure.

Since you say you do not have an easy access to a desktop, we shall go ahead with the drive inside the enclosure and see what happens.

Try to access the external drive booting with Live Linux Lucid Puppy.

My post here: Is there any way of saving a completely unrecognisable hard drive?
[Go to the topic Recovering files from the non-bootable Internal Drive: in this thread Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer on how-to. In your case it will be your external enclosure with the Toshiba 2TB drive in it..]

If you need any clarifications, ask.