I was told by a computer guru that a lot of the time when an external hard drive goes bad it's not the drive itself that's bad. If you take the drive out of its box and install it in a transfer box usually you can save everything. When my old XP computer died I had a different problem though. I put the hard drive in a transfer box and when I tried to move everything to the new computer it wouldn't let me access my files. It straight up told me I didn't have permission to access the files on the old drive. I had to have a guru get into the old drive for me.
Cari