Restoring a corrupted harddrive

[swak]

I put a bunch of stuff on a hard drive that my friend bought for him but after taking it in a car the hard drive became corrupt and I can't pull anything off it now. Does anyone know of any good hard drive recovery solutions? The computer is able to see the hard drive but it's like the hard drive lost it's formatting and so in order to start using it again it has to be formatted. Any ideas? Thanks.

[asheep_uk]

Check it out in Disk Utility, that'll tell you what the problem is.

[swak]

Actually I got Disk Warrior but when I was about to use the app on the external, I plugged it in and discovered it's a problem with the hard drive that does this: I plug it in and it asks me to format, I unplug it and plug it in and then it shows up on the computer with no problem. It just randomly says that it needs to be formatted. I believe that he bought the hard drive in China I think. I think that it's refurbished. This is scaring me away from buying refurbished stuff.

[asheep_uk]

That's like saying you bought something online and it didn't turn up, so that'll put you off buying anything online. It depends where you get refurbished goods from.