A friends laptop with all his work died. We have removed the HD and connected it ot a usb connection but just get errors and asks to format. Have tried HDD regenerator, easy recovery, getdatabackfor fat, file recover and some more with no luck. just errors. I take it that the drive is bad even though it makes noises.

You might be able to save the drive,

Using 2.5 cable adapter from laptop HDD to 3.5 desktop HDD connector. Best bet is to either find someone who has this type of setup or go buy the connectors yourself. You would still need to get Norton Ghost or opensource version to clone that bad drive to a new 2.5 HDD for the laptop. If it's really really bad and you get errors while cloning or backup then you're out of luck. You could put the drive in the refg to cool it then it again. Another way it to take a screw driver and tap it a few times lightly, don't go crazy. There are companies out there that can recover the data for you, but at a high price.

try to format drive then use recovery software
best to use 3rd party formating with boot disc
and for that you will need to connect to ide cable
unless your bios on motherboard allows for usb boot
some do some don't
after a successful format you should be able to use recovery software to get data
do not write to drive
normal formatting only writes to MFT making it look like there no files so under normal conditions OS can write new data

I have setup linux on an old machine, but the drive cannot be accessed.
I have tried to repair windows, but get no option to repair so attempted to reinstall but get a message saying that the drive is corrupt.
With the file recovery software doing a raw data search after 8 hours had 900mb data but had another 240 hours to run.So there is stuff in there.The data found makes no sense at all DIR.24HTM etc etc,

Try using the File Scavenger trial from here and recover a couple of pictures and stuff to see if if they recover correctly. I bought it and highly recommend it. My bro recently lost a bunch of data on his drive due to a corrupted partition table and I was able to recover all of it (about 97GB) in about an hour and a half to a USB HDD. And out of all the data it recovered, only about 100MB was still corrupt. So I have only good things to say about it.

This might seem counter productive but it works, but for the sake of safetly try other suggestions first. My suggestion is, format the hard drive then use get data back to recover after the format. I used this and recovered over 8 gbs or music among other things. However as I said try the other suggestions first because I dont know if it will recover is about a hard drive error and a reformat.
cheers
Hynesy:wave: