Recovering files

Have recuva and have used it many times works great. A couple of days ago I erased 1100 hundred movies by mistake. I am trying to recover them All of a sudden every time I try I get the message ( Device not ready). I went out about bought another external hard drive and still get the same message. I reformatted the drive but it didn't do any good. Anyone have any ideas

Lets get a few things sorted.

What's your OS?

Give some description of the hard drive in question; internal, external, USB connected, NAS, RAID, file system type?

More info = tailored advice.

You didn't reformat the drive you deleted the videos off did you?

Is either drive shown in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management?

If so, what drive letter and file system?