Windows 7 stopped booting

Run error checking on the drive. Right click the drive in my computer, select properties, tools, then error checking. That should find any bad sectors, however it sounds like a bad drive.

That sounds like a data corruption problem or hard disk firmware corruption. If you plug the drive in using your external enclosure under windows and right click on it, select properties, tools and go to error-checking, will windows allow you to run an error check on the disk? If the system cannot perform any interaction with the drive, it may just be that it's broken and it needs replacing.

One thing I have tried before which gave me a more conclusive answer was to run an Ubuntu live cd on your computer and then plug the hard disk in using your external case. Sometimes Ubuntu will even tell you if the drive is corrupted. If you need to create a live CD, the image is downloadable from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download Good luck, hope this helps.