A friend had some form of catastrophic failure on an HP mini 1000, unbootable. Of course there was data that wasn't backed up. I've removed the SSD and hooked it up to a ZIF 40 enclosure but can not seem to get the drive to be recognized in Windows 7.

In Disk Management it displays as present, but uninitialized. Attempting to initialize it presents an error Virtual Disk Manager - "The device is not ready".

There is scant information on MIE (the custom OS), so I'm not even sure what kind of file system I'm dealing with. In any case, if the filesystem is indeed some flavor other than FAT or NTFS, is this error consistent with that? Are there any creative ideas out there as to how the data can be recovered?

Update: Thanks for all the suggestions! I hadn't even considered running a live cd. Unfortunately no luck with Ubuntu (live cd) or explore2fs. The zif connection seems ok (color coded green led for proper connect, orange for not). The drive can't be initialized and therefore can't be formatted, so I guess there may be some real damage. Probably needs to head to a specialist. Thanks again for the feedback, much appreciated.