I'm travelling around and have my hard drived in bubble wrap and plug them into a dongle and power cord to connect them so that i can use all the drives with one plug. Unfortunately I plugged the data IDE cord in upside down once and now I can't seem to read the drive. Now when I plug it in (right side up) the drive is recognized immidiate upon plugging the USB end into the computer but the computer can't read the drive, it shows no data when i look at properties but would let me format. Before I give up and format the drive, losing all my data I'm wondering if there is a way to recover the data. I assume that nothing would have happened to most of the data. I'm expecting this type of human error to be uncommon but I'm hoping that someone will have some advice.

delete

i'd try plugging in the drive internally.

There are many programs that search and recover drives. Most of them will let you see what files it will recover for free and then charge $30-$50 bucks to do the recover. It takes around 12 hours for a normal drive.

Don't remember the names off of the top my head, search the forums or just use google.