External Hard Drive Woes

[DrunKBunny]

This morning I was browsing through my external hard drive when I hear a click, and the device gets disconnected from my computer. Now every time I turn it on, if a process has anything to do with the external drive, it just freezes or doesn't start up at all. For example if I'm at my desktop and I turn it on, the safely remove hardware pops up but if I click on it, it won't bring the window up. If I try to go to control panel --> system, the system window won't show up. I can get to computer management --> storage, but once I try to scan or refresh drives, it freezes. Sometimes I won't be able to open any applications or my computer.

Once I turn off the external, everything works again and the windows that weren't starting up instantly appear. This is really frustrating because I can't run any sort of diagnostic on the drive, since either the program won't start up or if it was already running and I turn on the drive, it just freezes until I turn the drive off. I've isolated the problem to the internal hard drive itself, since I've tried switching computers/enclosures/cables with the same result. Anyone ever encounter this problem or know how to resolve this - preferably keeping my data intact (I keep all my movies/game images on this drive and I've long since misplaced a lot of the cd's ). Thanks in advance.