Need help getting old data off of non-formated drive????

[vdub17]

I'm new to the forum and pretty computer illiterate, maybe someone can help me.
I had an external hard drive and the casing failed, so I had to install it in my pc as a piggyback drive. Well, I switched over to mac and wanted to transfer all of my data over, but ran into several roadblocks.
First the main harddrive on the pc crashed so I bought a new external case and made my old hard drive external again. Now when I try and use it, it says that I need to format my drive, but won't I lose all of my data if I do this?
So I'm wondering if there is anyway to either retrieve data from a non-formated hard drive, or if I have to format the drive and then recover the data somehow(which I would need more help with).
Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[wunkunn]

DO NOT FORMAT the drive if you want to recover the files on it. My thoughts are to slave it to another PC. (External drives on USB sometimes get really dumb if you forget to get permission to disconnect them or disconnect them after the comp has been powered down)

Good Luck

 

[vdub17]

thanks wunkun
I'll try putting it in tomorrow