external not showing in my computer

[armymedic22]

i have a smart disk firelite 60gb external hard drive. it has worked just fine no problem for a few months. the other day it just stopped showing. i have tried it on a couple different computers and still nothing. it will not show up in my computer and it wont show up under disk management. i found it in computer management under device manager disk drives. it says the device is working properly. i have unisntalled the driver and reinstalled it a couple times and still nothing. under the volume tab of the device properties it comes up with...
disk: unknown
type: unknown
status: unreadable
partition style: not applicable
capacity: 0 mb
unallocated space: 0 mb
reversed space: 0 mb

i have alot of important files on there is there any way for me to get this drive to work again? or at least recover the files that are there?

 

[Nodsu]

Try connecting the disk directly to your computer - it may be the USB-ATA chip that is bad and not the drive itself.

 

[armymedic22]

i know a little bit about computers but i dont think i know how to connect it directly to the computer

 

[Samstoned]

need to take out of the case find out what type of drive SATA or IDE
don't thin kit be a scsi drive
search on how to open up your machine and set jumpers the right cable to use
when you get to this point and turn on machine
if chkdsk comes up on boot don't let it run
some ext drives are configed as dynamic and xp may want to fix back to basic
before you do to all this make sure the usb connection is OK


if still in doubt
PM me on Data Recovery

 

[benken2202001]

this happened to me once.

Simply unscrew the box and remove the outer ATA microchip from the Harddrive. It now acts as a normal ATA-Drive. You can read up on how to "add" a harddrive to your existing computer.

(this is just my experience.. i'm not sure if your drive will behave as mine did)

 

[armymedic22]

well im not exactly sure what i did, i got it working again. i took the external apart and put another hard drive in the casing to see if it would work. magicaly when i put the original one back in it just started working not sure how that works but thanks for the help

 

[Nodsu]

It was probably just a loose cable or an oxidised contact, which you resolved by replugging the devices.