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I ran photorec on an old WD20EARX hdd that has a damaged/lost partition. All I'm getting is a .diskimage and what I believe are just other false positive files. The consensus seems to be that this happens on drives that were encrypted. Thing is, the drive was never encrypted, doesn't have any default hardware encryption that I am aware of, and never even has an OS installed. It was just used for file storage. I've tried using testdisk also but everything I attempt always fails with that. Is there any option at recovering my files?

Please provide the Testdisk log file.

Okay, but the testdisk log appears to be empty. It never seems to update after I perform actions. So far, I've tried to read with testdisk and use phototec on the physical drive several times. Testdisk always says it cannot find a partition and photorec only pulls the files mentioned above and shown in the photorec log. I most recently created an raw image of the drive using testdisk. It said "image created successfully but read errors I occurred." Right now I'm trying to use photrec on the image, to see if I can recover any files. But I have a feeling it will give me the same results as before when I tried to use it on the physical drive.

How do you operate Testdisk and Photorec?

Testdisk - https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

PhotoRec - https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Excuse me, myquestion was not precise enough!

There is no explanation that the Testdisk log is nearly empty and the Photorec log is not.
What is your operating system? Are you running your operating system as "live system" from CD, DVD or USB?

I'm using Windows 10. I am NOT running it as a live system.

The log file did update this time, but only to a certain point. The last thing I was trying to do was analyze the physical disk again. It gets stuck on about 12% and says there are read errors (but did not record this on log as I had to force close the program).

I've included the most recent log file which hopefully will have some other useful information.

Please duplicate your drive as described in the manual.

Before you might check your SMART parameters as decribed in this post

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10910

and post your log file here.

By duplicate, do you mean imaging the drive? I've already done that. I got an image.dd file. Then I tried to run photorec on that. The results and log for that were in my initial posts.

You are supposed to run the Testdisk package on your duplicate because you expect the duplicate to be free of physical sector errors.
There is no use to run Testdisk on a broken source once you have physically intact duplicate.