Technology Forum

Hi all, I was hoping someone here might be able to help me. Ive been online all day reading through similar problems and still no luck. I have a WD My Book 500GB external HDD (model number WD5000C032) which i use to back up all my photos, home movies and such from my laptop running windows xp. It got knocked over the other day and hasnt worked since (i think it was one knock too many). When it starts up it whirrs 4 or 5 times then goes quiet. Its still on, the green light is steady and my computer pops up the "safely remove hardware" icon in the tray area. I have tried testdisk recommended on this forum in another thread and it says "read failed" or something like that. In disk management the drive isnt recognised at all but in device manager you can see it - it is enabled but the location says location 0 I have tried: * rebooting with it on, with it off then plugging it in and switching it on making sure its plugged into a direct wall socket * its not plugged through a hub * tried it on another computer (same results) * my laptop usb ports are ok as ive tried other usb devices on them * WD data lifeguard doesnt recognise it * Ive taken off the outer casing and i cant see anything immediately wrong but then again i dont really want to play around not really knowing what im doing I really dont want to lose anything on this drive - is there something else i can try? Thanks