Is my external disk dead? (Maxtor OneTouch Easy III)

Hello to all.
I'm facing this strange problem with a Maxtor OneTouch Easy III external disk (500GB) connected via USB. The disk was working perfectly straight for 2+ years without any problems. Due to my work my pc remains open 24/7, performing in heavy load quite a bit. Some days ago and while I was working with my PC I got some strange behaviour, like slow-downs, "not responding" problems etc and finally a nasty BSOD! Unfortunately I didn't wrote down the message of the BSOD. When I reboot I realised that my external disk was not recognized by the OS (Vista x86) anymore, and whatever I did, it was only recognized as an "unknown device". When I power on the disk the light indicator on the front freezes (the activity indicator of this disk is like a while light that goes up and down in normal conditions). If I turn the disk off and back on after a while the indicator lights normaly, but no activity whatsoever. I can only hear the fan inside the enclosure. I tried everything including a re-installation of Vista, unplug every other USB device except mouse etc but still, hard disk remains unrecognized. What do you think? A recently died hard disk? If this is the case I'm completely distroyed as it contained about 400GB of valuable data which I cannot recover from anywhere else (= ALL my work since 2001!!). My pc specs: CPU Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5GHz, 4 GB Mushkin DDRII RAM, Gigabyte x48 motherboard etc. Any help would be more than welcome. Many thanks in advance!! Cheers,

Kostas

hmm, a new OS installation isn't the same like trying it in another pc? thanks for the reply!

I suggest taking the Hard Drive out of the eDxternal case.. I had exactly the same thing happen to me with a WD Passport. The drive was 100% perfect but the interface elecronics had broken.

I am in the exact same situation, moved all my files to the maxtor drive since i brought a new computer and delayed moving them on to my new system and now the drive does not work and i might have lost all my data since 2000 . let me know if you found a solution.