Please help with lost files

[jenkins24]

I recently hooked up an external hd and put about 12,000 mp3's on it. It has worked great until today when i turned it on the computer said that the drive needs to be formatted before i can use it. Obviously it was already formatted and i am afraid that all of my music is lost. I am running windows vista, and the hd was a 120gb wd. please help!

[pam123]

Go find a good friend, and check the external hd on his machine.
You need to know if the problem is the external drive or your computer.
If the hd just died on you then you have to decide if data recovery is worth the time and money.
If the hd is OK then we take a hard look at your usb connection and Windows install ( If you've been yanking that drive out while it's still powered up stop doing that.).