Is there anything I can do to restore recovered pngs that won't open in anything?

[mk4101]

I had to recover a lot of projects and images to go with them when I accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive and now most of the images won't open at all, not in photo viewer, paint, web browser, nothing.
I've tried using DISM to check for corruption but it says there are no problems with any file's integrity, yet when I try to restore them the software and sites I've used don't even recognise the images as pngs even though png is their stated file type in their properties.
Renaming them to end in .jpg doesn't change the file type to jpg, it just adds ".jpg" on the end, and any online conversion I try to use gets an error because it doesn't recognise the file as a png.
I've tried using other recovery software and the result is the same. Also, this is only happening to the recovered images, all other pngs I create open just fine.

Is there anything I can do now or is this a lost cause?
Thank you in advance

 

[Wolfie]

Hi,

I would download as many different recovery apps as I could and try them all, you might get lucky with one of them?.

Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free! (ccleaner.com)

See also.

Be careful when installing apps. How to block additional apps installation. | Windows 10 Forums

 

[Ronald porter]

Windows have a default File Explorer as a file manager and can help to display EXIF metadata along with the file name on your computer. Once the metadata of the recovered files is visible, you can filter the recovered images.
For recovery, It’s recommended to get the free trial of a recovery software and asses the recovery capabilities of the software.