Laptop crash, and now my external hard drive is saying "Drive is not formatted. Format now?"

Try TestDisk; I could almost completely recover my 320 GB WD Ex.Hdd. It is a simple and free Open source coded console application, Linux version is much better to recover because of the illegal character support of Linux.

"What you need is a ""complete undelete"" sytle program or one that advertises data recovery. To be absolutely safe you would want to back up the drive sector by sector with something like Symanctec Ghost or Acronis Trueimage before attempting recovery in case the tool writes to the drive for some reason.

Of course all of this will cost you time, effort, and money. It's hard to say how much of each it might take and you would have to decide when to cut your losses if the first few attempts don't work."