Urgent!! Help needed to recover lost data

Yes I think just about everything possible was tried

I do IT support, just got off the phone with someone with the exact same problem. His fix was to power down the laptop, power down the hard drive. Then plug into a computer that's already on. then, power on the external drive...voila

hope your solution is simple as that.

Maybe we're looking at the problem differently.

You mentioned you have 2 500gb drives. I see that your C is 450 and your D is 465. not including that 500gb external drive, does that mean you have 3 ~500gb drives? or did you partitioned 1TB drive into 2 ~500mb partitions?

did you have the external drive connected when you install 7?

I have used quite a few data recovery software and found that "GetDataBack" is one of the software that is really good & fast. The URL is:
Data Recovery Software Products - Runtime Software Products

You can get a free demo and try it out.

I know, That's what data recovery is for. From what she said, windows still can see the drive but tell her to re-format, that means the MBR table somehow got screwed up, with "GetDAtaBack" I am sure you can recover it.