Need help with mobile hard drive

[lizzy65]

Hi, i have a rock 3.5"mobile drive. It was working perfectly until a few days ago, nothing happened to start the problem. Except i was in the middle of copying some new pictures to it, i use it for storage of pictures. Anyhow it froze up, once it unfroze the drive no longer worked. I tried to plug it into another computer and it doesnt work there either. It uses a usb plug in case that isnt obvious. What happens is when i plug it in, the light goes on orange, it sounds like it is trying to work, in my tray the safely remove hardware icon comes on, then the drive stops making any noise, the icon disappears, and the drive isnt even recognized in my computer. on both computers its the same scenario. So then i went into device manager to see what happens exactly when i first turn it on. What happens is it appears in device manager, but then it disappears a moment later.
Any ideas?

 

[swwelsh]

I hate to say it, but it sounds like the drive is shot. Is it making any noises that it didn't before? Any sort of clicking or clunking sound normally means the drive has died. They don't always give any sign of going bad

 

[LookinAround]

See this Guide Troubleshoot: Windows Won't Recognize Your USB Hard Drive

 

[lizzy65]

Is there anyway for me to recover the data off the drive using recovery software?

 

[LookinAround]

You'll also find some partition management and recovery tools listed in Part1 of the guide i referred you to