This type thread seems to be something of a new norm here. It's one of those "only help me by doing what I say!" questions. I've seen it time and time again, and this forum is hardly the only one; people challenging the help they receive because of some mistaken superiority because they have a certificate or something. It's not like you got a phd in Computer Science, and even if you had- why does it make a difference? Clearly it didn't help you solve the original problem anyway so why does it make you more qualified to assert that provided solutions are wrong?
"I'm a newly graduated IT Tech I know what I'm doing" Clearly, at least in this particular case, you do not, that's why you posted here to begin with. If you knew what you were doing you wouldn't be asking what you should be doing. Same for me. If I post a question, it's because I either don't know what I'm doing or am unsure what I'm doing. I wouldn't be about to think that despite my years of working with computers not being any help to solve whatever issue I was facing that it is still applicable to tell people that they aren't helping and to try to direct some sort of "correct answer" as if I already knew the answer. Of course I could determine wether somebody is spouting nonsense, but there is none of that here and yet you are calling people out for doing so, it would seem.
In any case, I had a interestingly similar problem some years ago (DOS 6, doubt they cover that in "IT Tech school" either); It was related to a hard drive and trying to get it visible; since there was no fancy schmancy auto-detected back in this days, I had to guess and keep booting to a floppy and trying to view the contents of the drive. At some point I chose a geometry that was Close (but not the same) so everything appeared corrupted; directory and file names with smiley faces and high-ASCII symbols, etc. I ended up reformatting, and then subsequently had to start over by choosing the appropriate HD Type later on.
Not that that really helps. The filesystem is corrupted, that's pretty much all that can be said. Unless you've had to deal with manual selection of drive types it's probably pointing to a failure/impending failure. Wether the data on a drive is important or not doesn't make it's chance of recovery any greater, unfortunately. Before formatting that drive you could try Recuva, but it is probably too late.
P.S I believe Patio suggests slaving the drive because using it in a USB enclosure adds an additional layer of indirection (the ATA to USB circuitry) usually that circuitry is not very fault-tolerant.
