Data recovery on my SATA drive

Ok, so I have a SATA HDD that was in an HP computer that for some reason started a never ending boot loop. I pulled the drive out and put it in an external USB2.0 case then plugged that case in to a different computer. I then waited for my computer to say it was done installing the hardware, but looked at my "My Computer". To my surprise the drive did not show up, so I right clicked on "my computer" and went to manage. I then selected "disk management" and looked for the external drive. Disk manager does see it but only gives me the option to format. I need to recover some files from this drive, does anyone have an idea on how I can do that??

 

From my previous work on this sort of problem
NFTS RECOVERY
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/121517/EN-US/

NFTS BOOTSECTOR RECOVERY
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153973/EN-US/

SCROLL DOWN PAGE FOR A LIST OF RECOVERY OPTIONS
http://shsc.info/DataRecovery

For the knoppex live cd, that could copy from old to new

http://www.knoppix.org/-- english----http://www.knoppix.net/

 

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Version 4 of pc inspector (freeware works with nfts, and fat32, and finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector is damaged.( Thats what it says on the tin )

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

another possibility.
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html