what I have here is a laptop drive with xp. My friend plugged in via usb adapter to a windows 7 laptop to transfer pictures off it. I was told a message came up saying you need to initialize the drive to use it. He went ahead and did that, couldn't access the data and brought the drive to me.
I ran GDB for ntfs and fat then R-Studios on it both with no file systems found. When they were running, it looked as if it were a normal recovery, but at the end, no file systems were found.
Where do I go from here? The guy doesn't want to put any money into it and I'm doing it as a favor.

Thanks,
Dave

What's the drive's physical condition ? (i.e Do a surface test and post the result and S.M.A.R.T attributes)

If it was a real Windows 7 format , disk was ZERO FILLED. In this case, data is gone forever.

Check with a disk editor if all the sectors are zero'ed.

hXD tells all

yup windows7 format will usually wipes a drive (sucks)

Well send it to a national govt lab. For several hundred thousand dollars they'd get back your data via AFM process.

As for Win7 wiping the drive. That's a proper format. Format should mean erase and zero wipe. Took long enough..

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.