western digital 120 gb external hd failure

hi, trying to fix my friends external hard drive, he has a lot of files he needs off it. it was plugged into a mac and removed possibly during file transfer. when plugged into a mac, its unreadable. when i plug it into my vista pc and try to read from it, it freezes the window im working in. like if i try to go to my computer and refresh, it will freeze. the second i pull the drive out it unfreezes. i think its probably something fucked up in a partition table or osmething. i cant run chkdisk or anything on it because it freezes when i insert it or try to go to F: at command line. do you guys have any ideas on what to try next?
thanks

You're trying to do low-level file recovery from Vista and you're surprised it doesn't work? What the fuck is wrong with you?

thanks for the advice ur a fuckin expert

hold on let me drive home from work and fire up some faggot linux shit

>>4
If you knew the answer, why the cock did you ask and waste all of our time?

>>4
Oh Lord, son, I doubt you can run Linux, let alone use it for complicated file recovery if you use Vista.

Ask Google (or your favorite torrent site) for GetDataBack (there are two versions, one for FAT and one for NTFS so you should at least know which file system you used) and scan the disk.