DO NOT FORMAT THAT DRIVE !
Oh yes, I certainly won't be doing that !!.
If you go to control panel> admistrative tools>computer management>disk management
what does it show for the drive ?
It shows :-
Layout - Partition
Type - Basic
File System - nothing/blank
Status - Healthy (active)
Capacity - 76.68gb
Free Space - 76.68gb
% Free - 100%
Fault Tolerance - No
Overhead - 0%
If there is valuable data (e.g. your photos may not have "value" but they are priceless and irreplaceable for you) on the disk,
Yeah it's mainly pictures and music, and a few documents too like cv's, license/logbook copies etc - nothing of a monetary value as such. Some of it I can just simply re-scan, it's the photo's, music and copies of job applications I had on there that I'm really after.
You are more likely to harm than good at this stage if you try to recover the disk contents, unless you really know what you are doing, and with respect, you haven't given that impression so far!
I helped to build the computer originally, and am fine with adding things to it, sound cards, graphics cards and the like and when it first broke, I stripped it down again and cleaned all the dust/dirt out of it and have got it back up and running to this stage - but this is the first time I've ever had a hdd recovery problem so it's a new one to me to resolve.
Thanks again for all the help.