Lee,

If the drive powers up and spins up, and the computer acknowledges it's connected (you the sound that the computer makes when a USB device is connected) then download a free copy of getdataback from runtime.org. You'll need to know if your drive is formatted with FAT32 or NTFS; most likely it will be NTFS.

This is an absolutely amazing program that has saved our ass several times. It doesn't *ever* write anything to the drive being evaluated so even if it doesn't work, it won't screw up your chances of sending the drive for recovery. What it will do is go through and try to rebuild the structure of the drive and at the end it will list the files it's been able to find and recover, and you can check them out to see that they work.

If the recovery is successful, you buy the software, hook up a 2nd blank drive to your computer, and GetDataBack will copy all the files from the old drive to the new one.

I have used many data recovery tools, and this one is by far the best I've ever run into. It can basically restore almost anything (including drives that have been reformatted) except problems caused by hardware failures.