Ok, help! Please?

IF anyone can..

Here is the problem: I have a 500g HP Personal Media Drive that plugs into my HP computer via a bay (or you can hook it up to a USB port and use the power pack that it came with, natch). This was our backup to our other media; including husband's hard drive (same kind but 160g) and laptop..but due to his work expecting him to become a VJ as well as a DJ, we had to return it to service as his main hard drive; with my full music library and his full video library.

Well, it started to hesitate and refuse to access some files as of three days ago. We went out and bought a 1T HP stand-alone SimpleSave drive and tried to get as much stuff off the 500g as possible..but it quickly became unrecognizable by the desktop and was doing some clicking.

I got some advice here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x9192511

The drive has been in the freezer for awhile..I took it out twice and tried to get it to work. It powers up fine and sound pretty ok; except for some very faint clicking or some sort of noise. It would sporadically show up in My Computer, but was not recognized as a HP media drive. It IS assigned a letter. It will NOT let me open it from My Computer.

I have pretty much given it up for dead, BUT..
I found some advice about trying to see the drive through the Computer Management (under Control Panel). I did: Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management-> and when I plug the drive in, it DOES show up; as ONLINE and HEALTHY! Up top where the list of drives is; it says that it has all of its info (the data is still there). The problem seems to be that it has NO FILE SYSTEM.

I do not want to re-format. Any ideas? Should we attempt to take the drive out of the case and hook it up directly?

I just don't have a thousand dollars for the recovery..

Thanks for any help or advice.

Wait for the experts. The data on a drive includes some form of a "Table of Contents" which can become unreadable for whatever reason. There is free software to fix this problem, but since the drive doesn't function reliably, the first step might just be to clone the raw bits as accurately as possible to a new drive.

So, wait for the experts, but don't despair.

1. The external hard drive itself has gone bad.
2. The file system on the drive is corrupted
3. The controller card (the electronics where the power and usb plug in)is stuffed.

You said that a check in disc management shows that it has no file system. Try this before you do anything else:

With the drive plugged in, open device manager.
Right click My Computer, select Properties/Hardware/Device Manager

Expand disc drives by clicking on the + sign, right click the USB drive and select properties.

Go to the Volumes tab and click Populate. Look at what appears next to Partition style: It should say Master Boot Record.

If it doesn't, then we may have found the problem. There are ways to attempt to reconstruct the MBR.

As to putting the drive in the freezer, I'd be very wary of putting a complete USB drive in it's case anywhere near a freezer simply because of the controller card inside the case. Note, I've had a couple of external hard drives go bad and I took them out of their cases, threw away the controller card and installed the drives directly into a computer case where they worked perfectly.

If we assume that the drive itself is still readable you may like to try recovering your data by using this freeware tool: Partition Find and Mount http://www.softplatz.com/Soft/Utilities/File-Disk/Partition-Find-and-Mount.html