Can no longer see the external USB drive

I have a 1To WD external USB drive and suddenly today i can no longer see it on my computer explorer with ( windows XP)
-I checked under control panel devices and the drive is there.
-I also did cmd / disk list , and there the WD disk does not appear
-the computer acknowledges the drives when i insert in USB and when i take out …
-the drive is flashing constantly ( one per second)

I really hope someone can help to recover my data …
thanks

Hello,

How is the drive showing under disk management? If you haven’t check, please do that and see if the drive is going offline or not getting a drive letter.

thanks for your reply
the disk is not showing at all under disk management , which is the problem

thanks