External hard drive recognized with "new hardware installed and ready to use" bu

[pookie6415]

I've had this disk for ages, and while I was watching a file on it, all of a sudden it stopped working and then for every file I tried to open it said error reading file. I restarted the computer and then I got the message "hardware installed and ready to use" but it did not show in explorer. I tried different ports, it didn't work. I tried connecting another disk and it worked normally.
I read the thread about this problem and tried to use computer management, but in disk management this external disk does not show up so I cannot do anything with it. Can anyone help please?
I have a lot of data on it so formatting is not an option. Thank you.

 

[buwish]

I hate to break it to you, but it sounds like the drive is toast. How old is it? However, to give you a but of hope, you could always try and throw it in an external box and see if you can get anything off of it through a data recovery tool.