I checked the device manager and it does show as a usb toshiba drive, and it says it is working!

That's under the "Disk Drives" category is that correct? Rather than USB devices. There will be drivers for the caddy, and drivers for the disk itself.

In that case, you might be in luck, possibly just a head or bad area of the disk. See if R-Studio can see the disk. It doesn't need to be accessible in My Computer, it just needs to be installed. Let it do a scan, and once it is complete you'll be able to see all the files it has found on the disk. Files that can be fully recovered will be shown in green. Partial recovery - Amber. Destroyed - Red. If R-Studio can't do it.. nothing will!

excellent!
I will try it over the weekend
It does show in disk drives but only one item - toshiba mk2552gsx usb device.
the HD is a toshiba..the usb dock is EZ -dock

thanks so much
Jan

No prob's... keep updated Jan

I had a boot disk with hdd regeneration on it plugged the bad HD into my ez-dock and it found it and I ran it overnight...it was only half finished when I aborted it. It did the trick ..i could go in and copy the files to my computer. Then I put it back in the laptop and sure enough it booted up! I ran the diags from the bios...and it froze....then just for fun I did a full recovery [what the heck i am sending it back to HP anyway!] It worked, so now i am running a HD test again. It passed..I wonder if the HDD regerator fixes it for good or just temp?
Thanks for your encouragement to continue to try to recover the data. It was successful. HP said they were going to replace the HD and MB ..I hope they still do even though it is running now.
What do you think...is the HD really fixed?

Looks like the software detected bad sectors for it to still be running overnight, and would certainly explain everything. But with bad sectors, all this software can really do it patch them > mark them as bad so that no other data is written to the same area of the disk in future. I usually find that once a drive starts to develop bad sectors, it is often down hill from there. You may find more develop in a few weeks or so, so if HP said they are going to replace the HDD, it's definitely a good idea. Surely a replacement motherboard is overkill, but why not.

EDIT: Marked as Answered.