Hey guys, my gf has a HP Media Drive "HP HD1600 160GB" that has all her files and pictures and everything on it after she reformatted her computer. Now when she plugs it into her computer it "makes a strange noise and says its not recognized by windows" Shes devestated shes loosing all this stuff... is there any way we can recover it?

Thanks!

there is software out there that can "attempt" to recover your data
I have used:
http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm
and had great success on a drive that was formatted...
If you think the drive is on it's last leg, do yourself a favor and get the data off asap if it is important! In your case, I'm not sure if it's the actual drive, or maybe the logic board in the external unit. Either way...tick-tock.

Sounds like the drive is dead. Shy of sending it to a company to recover the data (usually about 10 bucks per gigabyte or more) she's probably screwed :(

10 bucks a gig is prob worth it for the years of pics they have on there... We're gonna see about pullin the board and throwin it in another if i cant get it to run next time I'm at her place

Research "click of death" on Google.

A couple of tips:
Sometimes with external drives, you can flip them upside down or find various ways to lay them so you can get data off them.

The more you screw with it, the more chance you have of completely destroying everything on it.

If you can't get a computer to recognize it, you *cannot* pull data off it without sending it to a data recovery place so they can remove the platters from the drive, put them in a working drive bed, and extract the data.

10 bucks per gig (USD) is a lean estimate. Search your local area for "data recovery service" to start getting quotes.

Go Buy a DVD burner. External hard drives/media storage units are great, but nothing beats a hard-copy backup. I try to do them twice a year for really important items. DVD holds 4.7GB of data.