My external hard drive cannot be detected

[Sgt_Strider]

I can't believe this is happening, but yesterday I brought an external hard drive to a friend's place to show her some pictures on my external hard drive. It's been working perfectly for the past year or so without any problems whatsoever. After we were done looking at the pictures, she pulled the hard drive out of the laptop's USB port without properly shutting down the external hard drive from Windows. Now, my laptop cannot detect the drive from "My Computer" or "Disk Management" from within the "Control Panel". I tried to do some Googling here, but none of the information really helped. There's a bit of important files on this hard drive. Can someone tell me what had happened and what I can do to recover the files? Thx!

 

[SILVR 6]

If it is a sata drive, (works with IDE too) take it out of the case and throw it inside a desktop computer and see if it's recognized. You can then save/transfer data from there.