Trying to recover data from failing hard drive

Hello,

I have a 500gb WD Scorpio Blue that I got from a friend. I hooked it up to a external adapter. It got a couple million bad sectors to the end of the hard drive but the first hundred GB were absolutely fine. So I made a 100 GB partition at the beginning of the hard drive and thought that I will make small partitions, scan them and concatenate them to the first partition if they have no problems.
But I did not get to do that. I postponed that until I would fill the first partition. I used about 20 gb of it on a IBM laptop running windows XP SP3 and it worked fine. Once I connected the hard drive to a HP running windows 7 and it showed a message that the hard drive needs to be formatted. I cancelled and unplugged the drive and since then on the IBM it didn't show up in My Computer, only if i started the laptop with the drive plugged in. I didn't use the hard drive for a couple of weeks, now when I connected it it said delayed write failed and it did not show any files, I re-connected it and it said 0 bytes used, 0 bytes total size on the first partition.
Back on the HP laptop it shows the other partitions, but the partition where I have my files is shown in my computer at other devices with a "?" in the icon. It also says that the filesystem is RAW.

When I try to format one of the partitions, Windows Explorer stops responding.

I guess Windows 7 screwed something up on the hard drive maybe the filesystem and after that it told me to format it, happened to me with a usb stick before.

Please tell me how can I recover my files as file recovery software seem to load forever even if they recognize my HDD. Thanks in advance.