Cannot see my wd elememt hdd

I moved my desk while loading from my external hdd and hit the surge protector off for a second. I do not see my external drive anymore.im running windows 7. I tried it in different USB slots, on my wife’s computer and my laptop all running win 7 but does not see it anymore. I have all my back up data on it which I’ve been using for a few years now. It sees it in device manager, and on one puter in disk management as unallocated space. When I try to initialize it it says its write protected. When I plug it in, down by the clock it  comes up saying it safe to remove/or eject it. It  is not  seen in my computer. I don’t want to format it. Is there anyway to save the files? I tried to reinstall xp as that was what I was running 2 days ago to see if xp would recognize it. I’m lost.  Any suggestions?  Thanks

It seems like the partition got corrupted, you might still be able to recover your files with a data recovery program.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

If that doesn’t work, there are more in-depth programs such as Ontrack Data Recovery Professional and GetDataBack.

The important thing here is to proceed slowly and carefully.

Since this disk is probably mechanically sound, the first step should be to image it sector-by-sector and work from that. But whatever you do, don’t perform any write operation to this disk.