wd external drive help please

Hi,
A while back I bought a 1tb western digital external drive. Recently the usb port plug broke and fell into the case. so I bought an enclosure for the drive. I put the drive in, hooked it up and now it wont show up on my computer. the light on the enclosure is on and i can hear the drive disk spinning. what can i do to get this thing to work. All my movies and music were on it and would really like to get them back. Any help at all is greatly appreciated.
thanks

 

It's a my book essentials 1tb drive and when I go through device manager, it shows a mass storage device. It says that it's working fine... that's about as far as I can get with that. I'm running xp and as far as service pack... no clue...the latest?

 

To find out the Service Pack you're running, Right click the My Computer icon and select properties. The General tab that comes up will show which service pack you're running. The latest Service Pack is Service Pack 3 if you're running 32-bit and Service Pack 2 if you're running 64-bit.

 

Ah, thanks for your help. It's service pack 3.

 

OK, just as a thought, did you try replacing the USB cable? I've had 3 cables go bad on me and replacing them resolved similar issues to what you have.

 

Some of these large external HD's require an external power supply. Did you hook yours up with that if it needs it?

 

That wouldn't have worked. It was the small end of the usb connector, in the case (mounted on the computer chip that mount to the drive) that broke off.

 

Yep, it had the usb and power supply separate, same as my new enclosure.

 

You could try 1 of these so you can retrieve your files off the drive.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3276554&CatId=470

 

I'll give that a shot. How does it work? Simply plug in and it should show up on my computer? And say nothing shows up, once again. What would that mean?