Helping a friend with this - they have a mac with WD external 'for mac' USB hard drive. The mini ubs connector got wrecked 'somehow' and I thought it would be a cinch to take the bare drive out, connect it to a USB to SATA adapter I have and copy data to a new USB hard drive they have.
I started with a windows PC with several different HFS drivers installed / uninstalled. Connecting the new 'for mac' hard drive in the windows PC, it sees 2 partitions - a 'cd drive' partition with apps, instructions, etc. and another HFS formatted empty hard drive. so the hfs drivers would appear to work (I uninstalled / installed new drivers over the last few days seeing if 1 was better than another. and I have 2 different USB / SATA adapters and tried them also).
Through all that, the win PC saw that old bare drive as an unknown partition. I connected the drive to a Mac and got 'this drive is unrecognizable' message and chose ignore, NOT initialize.
I tried several windows apps trying to get data back, including RAISE, which is specific for HFS? at best they found some files, likely the ones that would be on the CD drive part of the drive.
I then connected the drive to a mac and ran the trial of data rescue 3. Same thing - just a few files, not the hundreds of mp3s that should be on there.
I want to try diskwarrior on the mac, but there doesn't seem to be a trial?!
Any thoughts on what else to try? Frustrating that the drive spins, no clunking, data rescue testing shows the drive is OK physically, but no data from any of these apps : (
Had you made a image copy onto a scratch drive or partition first, and worked with the clone and booted the Mac off the recovery CD then you could have used the native apple tools to safely put that data on another disk, or a drive on the network.
At this point only a pro with a binary editor and expensive software that has no free trials is the only way to go.
If data is worth $500+ then consider getting a free estimate from somebody who knows what they are doing. Otherwise, reformat and move on.