Cant read my hard drve on my computer

[samsung11]

windows vista. my laptop does not want to read my hard drive , cant find it under device / disk manage.
may also have lost all data .
pls advise how to find / repair hard drive on laptop . if data / files are missing ,is there a way to recover it all (500gig)
the owner is out of pocket and desparate

 

[Pilk]

You need to start by troubleshooting the actual drive before you look in to OS r driver issues as often the case is the actual physical drive being damaged or corrupt.

 

[samsung11]

yeah tx for the reply , have done all the dis and re connectings and the drive now shows a black line "unallocated" at computer - disc management. this apparently indicates that the h/d is corrupted or ....
i now need to figure out how and with which programme???? i can try recover the data.the seagate troubleshooting site was also most helpful to get me thisfar

 

[Pilk]

Awesome there are many retrieval programs the program i use is get back data NTFS look it up and see if its any good. One other thing dont play with that drive at all dont allocate a partition or anything just leave it as is as you risk furthering the damage done to the drive.