Lightning vs. External

Last night a very harsh and random lightning strike did 2 things:
1.) I heard an extremely loud pop, which I thought was my ethernet port (cable runs underneath the house and to the router in another room) - perhaps it was my ethernet port, but the port on my end is fine, the port at the router's end was killed
2.) My Western Digital 1TB external hard drive which has literally thousands of dollars worth of data and other property (I work online) is now not functioning. The LCD light is on, but the drive will not show up in My Computer. I've unplugged and replugged every cord, from the AC adapter to the USB connecting it. Sometimes when I disconnect and reconnect, I get a tray icon stating that a USB device has malfunctioned and is not recognized.

Please tell me my drive was not killed? How can I go about fixing this?

 

I can't tell you your drive isn't dead but there may be hope,the first thing to do is try it in another computer it could be your computers USB system that took the hit and not the drive.

If you have been lucky only the drives external enclosure may have been damaged so you need to remove it from the enclosure,this will void your warranty but that's up to you to decide if the price of a new drive is worth it for the data on it.

So remove the drive from the enclosure completely until you have just hard drive in your hand,then connect the hard drive to a SATA connection in your computer including a power cable,just like a normal hard drive.

First check it shows up in your bios,hit del as your computer first boots,if it does boot into windows with the drive as a secondary,go to control panel, admin tools,computer management,disk management,check its properties and post back,also post the make and model of the hard drive 'NOT THE ENCLOSURE' what's written on the actual hard drive plus your operating system.

EDIT go control panel,system,device manager and check for an error messages related to USB,post those also.