Problem with my external hard drive pls help

[Breckan]

Problem with my external hard drive
K this is a strange problem. I have had this portable hard drive for over 6 months now and seems to have worked just fine until recently where it appears to have stopped being reconised?!?! I normally plugged it in and it made a little "ding" noise where it would come up as noticed as being plugged in but now although the light on the back of it is on and it makes the same "ding" noise when its plugged in, I don't recieve anything and am not able to find any trace of it. When I click on what I used to click on it on desktop to open it it just comes up as "error cannot be found" and there is not sign of it in my computer. Its as if that extra hard drive never existed.

Is there anything I can do to check the hard drive? I mean anything to get it open to even look into it to begin with? is there anyway I can still get to the data if it is corrupted? I cant think why it has suddenly done this and its worrying seeing I have a lot of important coursework on there but i'm suspecting it has become corrupted somehow. Can anyone help me here pls oh and i have tried it on my fathers laptop and it is not reconised there either. Pls someone give me a hand here . . Ty.

Sorry about all the posts i've done it was to do with confusion with waiting for time to go until i could post next. I didnt think i was posting.

[Bon-Z]

Your hard drive has probably gone bad and needs to be replaced. There are diagnostic tools available to check the consistency of the drive but to run the diagnostic tool the hard drive should be detected. You can take your hard drive to a Local Data Recovery Center. They can help you in recovering data from your hard drive.

[Dammit]

I think that your external hard drive has corrupted.. That's why when you are clicking the icon located on the desktop the error pops saying that "device cannot be found". For this, I would like to suggest you to do the Low-level formatting of your hard drive. But doing this you will lose your data from the hard drive. But after that your system can recognize the external hard drive for sure. I think that it's very tough to recover the data from the corrupted hard drive. So it would be better to do the low level formatting. For this you can download the software from the Internet which is free of cost. Hope that it helps.

[Pugsly]

You are getting this kind of error because either your hard disk had gone out of order but before replacing it first try to connect it with another sata cable that is try to change it if you it does not help you then try to format your hard-disk and reinstall the operating system. Then check whether your hard-disk is detected or not . If all these suggestion fail then i think you will have to replace your hard disk.