External hard drive not showing up! desperate for help!

[piedrafina]

first off, let me apologize for the length of this post, but i am a desperate woman!

i have an external drive (WD my book) that was giving me problems (i/o error and periodically telling me i had to format it to be able to use it). I was always able to get around the problem by disconnecting and reconnecting the drive. However, I knew it was about to kick the bucket, so I bought a replacement external HD, but before I could transfer the data over, the WD stopped showing up in my computer completely. i am at a total loss as to what to do now. this drive has pictures, music, videos of my god daughter, ebooks, my clients website files...... i am pulling my hair out!


a little more background info:
i can hear the hard drive spinning, it isn't clicking or beeping or anything. it sounds like it always did.

the hard drive was giving me problems, as i mentioned above, but the problems started in earnest when i upgraded from xp to windows 7.

when i installed the new drive, and booted up my computer again, the new drive booted up faster than the old one (especially given the issues it was having), and got assigned as drive G, which was the letter the old drive used to have. that was the point at which the old drive stopped being recognized at all.

I can see it in device manager, disk management and it is listed when i click on safely remove hardware.

disk management shows it as a physical drive, but not listed in the logical drive section. it says it is not initialized and has a capacity of 0.

one of the data recovery programs showed it as fat12.

i can see it in the windows usb viewer.


what i've tried so far:
changing cables, changing ports on the computer, shutting down the computer and disconnecting the power cable for several minutes (as opposed to just restarting).

starting up the computer and plugging in the hd a few minutes later. same results.

different computer. same results.

various data recovery and partition repair/recovery programs. some can see the drive, some can't. but none can seem to do anything with it at all.

testdisk didn't see it at all. all it saw was my c drive and the new external drive.



the most recent thing i tried was installing ubuntu. i wasn't able to actually get to the desktop, but i could get to the system settings and it said the same as it did in Windows; capacity 0. it did say that it was not partitioned.


i have been google searching for days and some of the things i have read say that i can try connecting it directly to the motherboard, but i am deahtly afraid of doing that. the last time i opened the case of a computer (to put in some extra memory), i fried the computer. i don't know what i did, but all it would do when you powered it on was beep. it is bad enough with the potential loss of the external drive, i can't afford to fry my computer.

i have downloaded various data recovery and partition repair programs and i am going to try them one by one and continue googling until i get to the bottom of it. hopefully "the bottom" will be saving my data and not reformatting. I don't mind reformatting the drive if i have to, but i would really like to get my files off of it before i do.

can someone please help? i'm desperate!

 

[electrontau]

One more thing you can try. You can crack open the ext. hard drive box and extract the hard drive inside. The problem COULD be the PCB board inside the box. Once the hard drive is extracted, plug into a computer like any internal drive. Make sure the computer is off, of course. Have someone you trust to do this if your not comfortable doing yourself. Or a computer technician.

If the drive is still showing errors the the problem is with the drive itself. If you need to extract the data. Google for data recovery tools. Professional data recovery can cost you around $1000 US or more.

Good luck.