Laptop doesn't recognise external hard drive

hi

In some serious bother here. I formatted my hard drive and installed fresh copy of windows. I backed up "my whole life" photographs, home videos, music etc. on my external hard drive Western Digital MyBook. Now I can't access the hard drive. I may have deleted all the partitions on my laptop before I installed Windows. But I thought this wouldn't matter as everything is in the external hard drive. Now I've attached the external hdd onto another computer and it's the same. Please don't tell me that the contents are not accessible now? I really need advice here please as I have no other backup and all my stuff is on here. Eagerly awaiting reply. thanks

Are you plugging a USB 2.0 device into a USB 1.1 port?

Go to start->settings->control panel->administrative tools->computer management->disk management and assign a letter if it is missing.

Some times the "enclosure" goes bad and the hard disk is fine. You could take the hard disk out of the enclosure and try it in another computer.

Hmmm, something wiped out the partition table. If you don't have anything really sensitive on it, you may want to take it to a local shop that has disk recovery tools that can rebuild partitions. Partition Commander and Partition Magic are examples of this software.

Yes, you could use one of these to do it yourself. Read the manual carefully first, and be very careful when committing any change that might destroy data.

Hi guys, just came back to let you know I've fixed the problem. The partition table had been deleted. This is what I did to solve

Go here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
and download a free utility called TestDisk (I downloaded the latest NON-beta version). It's a zipped file, just extract all files to a folder of your choice leaving the option "Use folder names" checked. Then, go to the folder where you unzipped the files, go to the Win folder, and run the testdisk-win.exe file. It runs in a DOS window, even though it says it's a Windows app, but it doesn't really matter at all.
So, start the app (you must run it with administrator privileges), wait for it to recognise all the drives, it will take 5-15 seconds. Choose the external drive. Confirm Intel/PC partition. Analyse it. Proceed. Enter to continue. Write on the next menu. Confirm. Quit the app. Disconnect USB cable from the device following the safe hardware removal procedure. Reboot your pc. Re-connect the device and it should be properly recognised, and the whole thing doesn't take longer than a couple of seconds!

Thank you guys for the advice and I hope this help others also