I have a 3.5" Western Digital My Book 500gb external hard drive. I gave it to a friend of mine, and he broke the USB port in it. I went to a nearby comp repair shop and had him solder the thing, and it didn't detect when it when I plugged it into my Dell Inspiron laptop. I recently saw about the 3.5" SATA to USB enclosure, so I went to check it. Strangely, when its placed in the enclosure, its not detecting in Windows. Also, when it was put as secondary (I'm guessing slave) to the shop fellow's desktop, it shows up in the BIOS and while starting, but then again doesn't show in Windows 7. The guy told me that I need to use a data recovery tool to get my data back.

P.S. Whe WD hard drive doesnt have an OS, just data. So my question is: Can I slave the drive to my Dell laptop and try to recover the data, and if so how? I would really appreciate it any help, thanks in advance.