Maxtor One Touch 250gb external problem

I have a 250gb Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus external hard drive. It worked great for a long time. I have alot of files on there i want to transfer to my computer. When i plugged it in it said the usb does not recognize it, so i did a device manger restart to the unrecognized drive, restarted my computer and it shows up in my devices and printers and one touch. It doesn't show up in My Computer folder. I tried to go into it and it kept on telling me to format it. I don't want to lose any of my files. The properties of the device says its working properly so i don't know what to do. Any help would be much appreciated.

Welcome to Windrivers aj021285. I am going to assume this drive is in an enclosure. If it is possible, remove the drive from the enclosure and hook it directly to the PC and then see if you can copy the data off. Over the last couple of weeks I have had clients with the same problem, different type of drives, the circuit board was bad and would not allow it to connect.

Likely if you can get the drive out you could also buy another external box to put it in.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...rive+enclosure

It's surprising how much more often the interface card in these external enclosures fails rather than the drive itself. Even if you connect the drive directly to the computer, and it still shows up as an unformatted drive, you may well be able to recover data with GetDataBack or similar recovery software.

No, it isn't freeware, but I've used it for 13 or 14 years, and it works well. By contrast, over the long haul, I'd describe my experiences with free recovery software as sub-optimal.