recovering files from hard drive using hard drive enclosure

[Raye]

ok a friend had his main hard drive crash in his emachine. He said it kept telling him full and would go to blue screen. He started eliminating programs but it still would do the same thing everytime he tried to use it until it eventually wouldn't boot. He had 3 hard drives on that machine. He didn't know what caused it. Anyway he bought 3 hard drive enclosures. He hooked the main C. drive up (in the enclosure) to an older compaq a friend had given him. It still wouldn't let him access anything on the drive and asked if he wanted to format the drive. He finally decided he didn't have much on that drive and so reformatted it. Then he took another hard drive (in an enclosure) from the emachine that had alot of data from projects he has been working on and hooked it to the usb port on the compaq and it worked fine and recognized the data on the drive. then he took the third drive from his emachine and hooked it (in an enclosure) to the compaq computer and it tells him when he clicks on it under [my computer] "disk in drive E is not formatted" yet when he looks at properties it says
File system: RAW
used: 0 bytes
free 0 bytes
yet the "pie diagram" shows all blue as if all space on the drive is used.

this last hard drive is a Western Digital WD 1200BB 120G

so he has one formatted drive, one that worked fine and one that it still won't recognize so he can access his files- all now in hard drive enclosures. I don't have access to his machine so I'm talking to him by computer and phone so if there is more info I need to get to make solving this puzzle possible so he can access that last drive let me know. Thanks

[LeftyAce]

I take it there was data on the drive the now says 'raw' that he'd like to get back? Take a look at this: http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/
You don't pay anything until you can see if they can get your data off....
Whatever he does, don't let him format the 'raw' partition! :-)

[Raye]

thanks. will check it out. Why would a drive now say "RAW" and say 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free? What does it mean?

[glc]

It means that the filesystem is trashed.

[Lespaul20]

The are a few programs that can rebuild the file system enough to recover data. We used one at work to recover picture from a hard drive. The price was around $80 and I think is called RecoverMyFiles. Surprisingly is worked really good.

[kev7555]

Yes, this proves my latest theories about WD drives. I have had the exact same problem with two of them, and two others simply died, no go, no nothing. All were only a few years old. I am now a Seagate fan. I will never give Western Digital another penny for their drives.

-Kev