External Hard drive not responding:(

[kaboose]

Hello,
I been using my WD Elements external drive (1Tb) since more than a year and never had any problem. I used it mainly to play videos on my xbox360 but today it suddenly stopped working so when I try plugging it n my computer it doesn’t show up n my computer. Many people have been telling be that its “dead” so I don’t really care about the actual drive I am wondering if there is a way to recover the data easily? Also the bluelight on the drive still turns on and makes a sound for first few minutes of connecting it to the computer but after that it goes silent and “Safely remove hardware” icon appears in the taskbar so my computer recognizes the drive but the icon in my computer folder never appears so I cannot access the drive. I have tried plugging in different computer and still no luck. I know I don’t have a faulty usb cable since I used that same cable to connect my printer and it works fine. I am able to see the drive in device manager but not in disk management. I have also read that I should put it in the freezer for some hours eventhough I haven’t tried that. Btw my drive is out of warranty as well.
Please help me

Computer Spec:
Dell Dimension 5150
Microsoft Windows XP SP2 (Media Center Edition) v2002
Intel Pentium D CPU 2.66 GHz
0.99 GB of RAM
Intel integrated graphics card

[Steve R Jones]

If you can't access the drive you can't recover the data.

Will the drive come out of the case so you could try hooking up internally?

[kaboose]

Well there has to be a way ... like i said the computer is recognizing the drive because when i plug it in i can see "Safely remove hardware" icon in taskbar showing my drive but i just cant see it in "my computer" ... and i havent tried taking the drive out .. as am gonna do that wid my buddy. Also on this cnet forum someone suggested to download this utility: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download and follow their steps but when i started doing it my drive shows the size of 2199 GB which is not correct as its 1TB ... as u can see here: http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/1125/2000k.jpg ... so hence i couldnt proceed further wid that solution.

[kaboose]

any further help would be really appreciated

So i took the drive out of the enclosure and i have no idea how to connect it to my pc .. this is how it looks like :
http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/3158/img2529d.jpg
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/9791/img2532i.jpg
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/2060/img2535e.jpg
http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/3977/img2538z.jpg
http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/7838/img2539k.jpg

[Steve R Jones]

The extra card probably slides out to see regular SATA connectors.

[zxw23]

chkdsk /f E:

copy paste this "above" into RUN. change the letter "E" to ur drives name. it worked for me. almost lost my drive. now its fully functioning.