Hard Drive Corrupted by virus, now not accessable

My buddy recently got a virus that apparrently corrupted the infrastructure of the hard drive or something because I can't access any of the files on it now. I took it out of his computer and now his works fine but now I'm trying to recover that data and I can't even see the drive if I boot up with an Acronis Disk Director bootable CD. How can I format a disk that I can't access???

no it does not. It does under the bios but not anywhere in windows. It showed up in my computer once, but it didn't have any context menu that I could access it just crahsed when I right clicked. It tried to install the drivers automatically (I'm using windows 7 RC) and it said it was successful and I needed to reboot so I did, and ever since then I can't find it anywhere

If you cannot access the drive even to reformat, it sounds like the media descriptor byte was zapped.

A program such as Partition Magic or other disk editor program might be able to at least reformat and possibly recover the drive.

i too have a similar problem with my external drive no drive is shown only when i connect shows a saely remove icon but n drive ...if my hard disk is failure isn't there any possibilty to get my files back please can you guys write me i really need my files back..thanks guys