Well, if the drive is working fine but only has a corrupted filesystem, then you should be able to read the data off of it. If the drive has hardware problems, though, and some blocks are not readable, then your data recovery software will have trouble dealing with that and likely crash your computer. That's when you need to image the drive.

Try booting the Rescue Remix or any other live CD with Photorec on it. Plug in your destination drive and mount it. Open a terminal and change directories to the destination drive. Run Photorec on the external drive from there.

Example:

cd /media/USB1/recoveryfolder/
sudo photorec /dev/sdc1

The above commands assumes that the destination drive is mounted at /media/USB!/recoveryfolder and than the bad disk is /dev/sdc (sdc1 is the first partition on the drive - I am assuming that there is only one partition on the drive)

Photorec is a file-carver. It can recover files from the disk without using the filesystem. If the case is that your filesystem is corrupted, then this will work well for you.

Thanks Andrew,

I tried with the Rescue Remix. But it is not detecting the USB device. In the system log I can see that USB controller detected the change in the usb port but failed to identify the device...Seems to be hardware failure, power failure of the USB box I think. Need to check with WD.

Thanks a lot for suggestions. photorec seems to be great tool.

Yo utilice la herramienta con un disco USB externo IOMATA de 40 GB y logre recuperar los archivos de su file system corrupto. Me parece una excelente alternativa libre para resolver este tipo de situaciones.

Andrew, photorec works great, I must say. I recovered my files with it. I olny needed to find the "name" of my pendrive - it was sdb1. Easy to detect by inputing the disk while having opened /dev directory.

easy to deal with, many recovery software can solve your problem, try it. Diskgetor may be the one.