Windows 7 - Hard Drive Problems - Please Read For Details

I apologize for the brief title and for this being in the wrong category if it is.

I recently purchased an 8 bay external hard drive tower (similar to a Drobo). I have 4 external drives I removed from their enclosures and installed in the tower. When I installed 4 of the hard drives my computer only recognized two of them.

I went into my disk management and assigned a drive letter to the 2 drives it did not recognize. When given the option to format them, I chose "no" because they contained data.

Windows now sees the devices with a drive letter, but each time I double click on that drive it tell me I need to format it before use. If I do so, I will loose the existing data.

I have downloaded a trial of a data recovery software and it sees the data that is on the disk (don't ask me how).

How do I get the data off the drive without formatting the disk?

Please help. This is my life's work.

Thank you.

You could give Recuva (freeware) a go. Excellent program.

Have you tried to "import" the drives, under disk management right click on the drive that you are having problems with and hopefully there will be the option to import the drive. If that does not work then you may have to take the drives that you are having problems with out and place them back in their respective enclosures and then move the files that you need. Once you have the files moved then you can put the drives back and just format them.