Question : Problem: Vista reports USB HDD with data (XP) as not allocated

My  HP notebook with XP professional died (motherboard problems) and was replaced with a HP running Vista. I purchased an external HDD enclosure (USB) to transfer the data from the old IDE HDD to the new notebook.  (Enclosure specs say it is compatible with Vista)
Vista identifies the USB HDD and installs it with no problem.
On Vista the HD is visible in Computor management (as unallocated) but not in My Computor. The event log displays: The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, has a bad block.
I have tried:
1. Reading the HDD as a master, slave or Cable sel.
2. Reading the HDD on a desk top with XP professional (not visible in my computor nor computor management) as well as on another as well as on another notebook with XP  - same problem,
3. Upgrading my bios on new notebook to the latest avaulable.
4. Reading the old unallocated disk with disk recovery software - does not show any files

The only thing I have not tried yet is to install the old HDD in my new notebook. I can not do that as the old one is an IDE and is not supported by the new notebook

Anny suggestions will be welcome as I would really like to recover the data.

Answer : Problem: Vista reports USB HDD with data (XP) as not allocated

Perhaps your old notebook crashed because your hard drive died, or the motherboard problem fried your hard drive.

The partition table could be corrupted.

If the disk space shows up as unallocated in disk management it means that there is no readable partition.

You could try to recover your partition using testdisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-6.11.3.win.zip

Read the following documentation before attempting to recover the partition: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk

If you have any questions, please ask.