Cursed seagate's killing me

In order to help you plz post your system/details. I am running a PC with Win7 - 64bit, i7 chip and 24 gigs of ram. I lost my 1TB External HD, one day its there and the next moment it's gone, my indicator light on the HD is blinking but that's it. I could see that the drive was online, but no capability to read the data, heck it wasn't even visible. On top of that there was no drive letter assigned to the Iomega 1 TB drive.

This is what I did; I have a Win 7 - 64bit - i7, 24 gigs Ram, Zero Raid, I could only see that my Iomega was online, but it had no drive letter and I could not read the data on it, in Control Panel>Administration Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk management I could right click and at one point I was only able to mark the partition as active, so I did so. The option to change drive letter and path would not work no matter what I did. There were no other options there to help assign it a (new) drive letter that worked. I even searched the Windows Help to no avail, until I did the following. I needed to determine if the drive was still good. So took the Iomega External 1TB hard drive and connected to a laptop using Windows Vista and bam, the laptop seen it, I can access all my files, but had to access as admin, so I learned my Iomega HD was still in good working order. I had even tried uninstalling the drivers and that did no good. So I reconnected it to my big machine Win7 - Home Premium i7 - 24gigs - Ram, Zero Raid setup. I went into Device Manager and I uninstalled the Iomega External HD at the "DEVICE MANAGER>DISK DRIVES" location, make sure its at the Disk Drives and "not the Universal Serial Bus Controllers", and with out restarting the machine I used the "Scanned for Hardware Changes" and it located the Iomega and it brought it completely back online and assigned it a drive letter all in one shot. Then I went into Control Panel>Administration Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk management to see if it had assigned it a drive letter and it had. Then I went into Explorer and there it was with an assigned drive letter and complete access with all my data intact. Prior to that it was only online and visible in disk management only, but not visible anywhere inside window period, it would not show in explorer/anywhere. Problem Solved!!! Now I'm watching a movie off of it #42 Jackie Robinson. GOOD LUCK!!