I'm trying to recover some data from a friend's hard drive. His bios doesn't recognize it,
and knoppix can't mount it. I removed it from his machine and stuck it in an external USB enclosure I have.
This is what Windows told me:



The drive should not be 100% empty. There should be multiple gigs of data on there.
When I try to take a peek at the contents of the drive I get this message:



Is this drive bricked, or is there something else I could try?

Program called GetDataBack worked great for me, though you will need an additional hard drive with at least enough free space for the entire drive to fit on. The program just runs through the whole drive, bit by bit, until it has all the information to recreate the headers etc.

try acronis true image as well. its a great program and can back up entire hard drives to dvds, network comps, split the drive up into multiple large files, and has great compression ratios.

i prefer Acronis True image to Norton Ghost. Gasp! use the bootable CD though. it will "goof" less if your HD is dying or if you have a program conflicting w/ it... eg alcohol/daemon. works really well though

can also try Hiren's boot cd... although thats something you'd have to google as its 'questionable' by many

you might also want to play with the jumper settings. I just had this same problem i had a drive that was formerly the primary in a machine and i put a new SATA HDD in the machine and reinstalled the OS. I put the old drive back in it and set the jumper to slave and i had the same problem, moved the jumper back to master- this drive was PATA and the new drive SATA so they are not on the same channel , and i was able to access the drive again

I'm running GetDataBack right now. Its telling me that it'll take about 3 hours, so fingers are crossed. Oh, and jumper is on master.

I had good experiences with GetDataBack [yes I used it several times]. I have an external hard drive that liked to randomly lose its partition table. I would plug it in, and it would sometimes show as RAW format, was not good. Never had any data lost after using GetDataBack though.