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Hard Drive Failure

Recently I bought a Hyundai H2 750GB USB 3.0 external disc drive for my daughter to take with her to university. One of the reasons I bought it I have to admit is that it looked nice and compact and was called a ‘Red Dragonfly’. It even lights up to tell you if you are using USB 3 or USB 2 so I was thrilled with it. However she rang me last night from on campus to tell me that she has tried everything she can think of to access the drive but can’t. She has just downloaded a lot of information from the university intranet and was storing everything on the drive including half of her first year’s dissertation. Now she can’t get at it and the online retailer told me they could not accept any responsibility for loss of digital content. She went to the IT department on site and they refused to touch it because it would void the warranty but suggested the possibility of having someone recover the information professionally. It wasn’t the most expensive drive in the world and I would normally just send it back for a replacement but the content is the issue. Are you able to help?

I bought an external Seagate 1TB drive a while ago and have been using it on a regular basis. The only problem now is that the drive is not being recognized by any of the computers I attach it to. I know there is a problem with the Seagate drive because the other drives I have all are recognized first time every time and have never let me down. I wasn’t going to buy a Seagate drive but my friend told me the quality had improved because his was working fine. When I plug it in the lights flash for a few seconds and then nothing. There’s no noise to indicate that it’s trying to spin up so I don’t know what is going on. There is obviously power to the device and the USB ports are all functioning because once in a blue moon the disc letter flashes up and then vanishes. I’ve been listening out for any telltale noises such as grating or scraping but there’s been nothing. I’ve got quite a bit of nostalgia on that drive including photos taken just before my mother died so I would really like to save them rather than consign them to a recycle bin somewhere, please help?