Help with an external hard drive

I am having problems with my external toshiba 500gb hard drive. Not sure what happened to it from the time I last used it till now but when I connect it and go to my computer to try to open it, It says youneed to format the disk before you can use it and when I checked the properties of that drive it now shows 0 bytes in used space. First question would be how could this have happened from the last time I used it almost a year ago. Last question is all my data lost or is there a way I can retrive it from the drive. I had some important documents on there that I was trying to retrive for work when I stumbled on this situation and need them by Friday more the latest..... Any help would be very much appretiative.

 

Does it show a drive letter? If not assign it a letter. Also can you try it on another machine?

 

it shows it is local disk E when you go to Computer. I also did that as well and it says the same thing about formating the disk with 0 space used on 3 different computers.

 

Just an idea try unplugging and replugging in its case, may be a connection issue.

 

just tried it and it still says the same thing

 

Did you try replacing the USB cable? Was the drive dropped or exposed to some type of magnetic field?

I occasionally have problems with my external Toshiba 120GB and have to pull the connector from the computer and re-connect it. I'm looking for a new cable because I ran the 5-stage chkdsk on the drive and it shows as clean.

 

You may need to try to remove the hard drive out of the external enclosure and connect it directly to your PC internally via an available SATA/IDE port. Or alternatively you could try to use another USB/enclosure adapter.