Laptop not recognizing my hard drive anymore?

My external hard-drive isn't recognized... what can I do?

• I have had my SimpleTech 250GB external for about 6 months now. It has worked fine and was the backup for a lot of files on my computer. It also stored all my music and my modeling portfolio because the file sizes are too big to keep it all on my laptop. Anyway... today, randomly, while editing photos, my laptop stopped recognizing the external. I had files open from it, and it was working fine all morning. It stopped being recognized by the laptop after we had a blackout. The laptop was running on a power cord, but continued to run seemingly flawlessly on battery life during the blackout. I didn't use the computer during this time, though. However, when I came back to it, there was no message about the USB being disconnected or a device being removed. Sometimes, if I don't access the drive, it stops showing up, but will show again if I unplug it and plug it back in. This isn't working this time however. When I plug it in, it makes the normal fan noises as it's warming up and my laptop recognizes a USB is active for about one minute, then loses it and the fan in the HD stops, but the power light remains on. The HD uses power from the laptop, not its own power source. It is also connected with a USB cable, not fine cable, to the laptop. Any ideas on what happened? Is it possible to retrieve the data on the HD if it is fried? Where can I bring it to have this done if possible?

• Answer:

  Your external drive doesn't require much power running off the USB so it is possible that a power spike could fry something on it. Try it on another computer first to see it it will work on a different machine. If it does, next try a different USB port on your computer and see if it is recognized. If no computer can recognize the drive try removing it from the USB case and use an adapter to connect the data and power cables to it in a desktop computer. If all of the above fails your drive is toast. Often the data can be recovered by professionals, but it is an expensive option costing hundreds of dollars if not more. There are data recovery specialists that you can mail the drive to and get an estimate on what it would cost first.