Data recovery on an external toshiba canvio?

[Brendl]

I've had a 3GB Toshiba canvio for over a few years nao, and it's never given me a problem. I had previously been using it with a Win7 laptop, I pulled out the USB cord without first selecting the eject option, even so it still worked fine on the new Win8 comp... At first anyway.

After about 3 hours of use on the new comp, it still stalled up while d/ling a file. I waited about half an hour and it remained frozen. After that none of the folders showed up anymore. In fact it also seems to take 2 min or so to even try to get it to open. I tried replugging it into the original Win7 comp, but nothing shows up regardless.

What just happened? Can I restore my data? But srsly wtf just happened?

 

[Elixer]

Did you actually remove the HD from the external enclosure, and stick it in a desktop machine to see if it can still see it ?
Also, did you check the SMART status of the HD (using something like crystaldiskinfo) ?

If the desktop machine can still see the HD, then, the correct thing to do to try and salvage stuff is to clone the HD to another HD of the same size, then run something like testdisk on the new HD that you cloned, and see if it can recover files.
If no, then you have limited options, and only a professional recovery service can try to recover the files, but, it is very expensive.

HDs (and pretty much most everything else) can die without notice.
And in case it wasn't obvious, you need multiple copies of your data to avoid things like this.