My wifes dell crashed i took the hard drive out and got a conneter to hook to my

[aftermath1985]

its a sata hard drive that lost its start up memory but every thing else was there when i ran the disk scan before taking it out but when hooked to my hp it shows the recovery and hard drive but it wont let me get into it it says format first

 

[terryd75]

I'd install that drive into an external usb enclosure and access it that way. have you tried that?

 

[canadian69]

Can you explain what "lost its start up memory" means? NTFS drives are security restricted, so if you drop a drive from another Win7 machine into another Win7 machine or a XP machine you will likely have issues.
You also said "it shows recovery and hard drive" which is also confusing to me. Can you explain what you are seeing in more detail? Do you mean that the drive is seen by the operating system, but you can only access a "recovery partition"?