[Thespian]

I have a Hitachi Travelstar from my old Dell laptop that I have been using with my new HP laptop via SATA/USB interface for more than a year. At some point the HP stopped recognizing the drive. The SATA bridge shows up in the SYSTRAY in the removable devices but Disk Management in Windows 7 hangs trying to scan the drives when it is attached. The access lamp on the SATA/USB interface stays on constantly. This remains true when I plug the USB into any other laptop. I tried putting the drive in another laptop and booting from the Windows Recovery CD but the O/S can't see the drive. The BIOS on the computer sees it as does old Partition Magic 8.0 when booted from the CD. Partition Magic's scan for errors only shows that the volume was improperly dismounted. Trying to boot from the drive gives the Dell "[XLRD] ATA error" message. I didn't expect I could boot from it since it came from another computer but I hoped I would be able to get something. I tried converting the primary partition to a logical partition with Partition Magic in hopes of re-writing the partition table and possibly fixing the error. Still have the same problems. I don't ever want to boot the drive up but only want to access the data. Is there a low level, non-windows disk recovery software product out there that is bootable from CD that can allow me to retrieve the data? It would have to support USB to at least give me somewhere to back up the data.