Windows 7: Ext HDD - removed from enclosure, put in dock, data inaccessible

hi, I really know nothing about these things but here is my situation:

samsung story 1.5tb USB2.0 external drive, switched it on the other day and it started smoking. not sure what was making the smoke.

removed the drive from the enclosure and got a SATA>USB dock thing for it. it didn't appear in the Computer with my internal drives but was visible in diskmgmt as "Healthy (Active, Recovery Partition)" but with the File System column empty and no letter assigned. right click only offers a menu with "Help" on it. not much help.



used diskpart to assign a letter and it now appears in Computer but says all its capacity (except ~250mb) is free and, when I open it, there are no files to see, only a folder "Recovery", which is empty. in diskmgmt it still has no letter assigned.

used a program called Recuva and it shows me some small files but nothing I recognise.

hoping that maybe the boot bit just needs rebuilt or something and the data is still there? I have no idea about these things, though. could it be something to do with it not wanting to operate outside of the original enclosure, like samsung have some kind of encryptive/I-don't-know thing to prevent people doing this to circumnavigate any data protection nonsense (which, in any case, I hadn't activated)?

any ideas?

thanks!!

am I in the wrong place?

The Sata dock should work more or less the same as the original Samsung enclosure. I don't think the problem is there.

What you can try is to run WinDirStat and see whether it can detect any data on the drive. http://windirstat.info/

thanks for the response.

that prog tells me there are other folders and files but not much of it and none of my data is visible - it's all stuff like bootmgr.exe.mui and .dat files. does that make it sound like it's goosed?

Yeah, looks like it. I would reformat it and redefine a partition on it.