My verbatim external hard drive has stopped working. I plugged it in to a computer at work which cam up with "power surge" the light no longer comes on and it is not being recognised in my system device manager. Is there anyway to retrieve the data stored on the hard drive?

SOURCE: My verbatim usb external hard drive quit working

The brand of your HD is Verbatim, so it should not show up as Toshiba in the Device Manager. Your computer is detecting another device.

Please do not rely on the Device Manager, you have to check the Disk Management instead. If the HD did not show up in the Disk Management, try connecting the HD into another USB ports of the problem computer. It could only be the USB ports of the problem computer is bad.

How many computers do you have? If you have 3 PCs and only one computer is having a problem, then you might need to update the USB driver of the problem computer.

Have a great day!

SOURCE: 1tb Verbatim External Hard Troubleshoot

does it work on another pc ok? Do other usb devices work ok? Give me the details and I can help you solve this.

Paul

SOURCE: Verbatim 320 gb usb external

An external storage-device has four major components:

* the USB cable

* the power-adapter

* the disk-drive inside the enclosure

* the USB-to-disk-drive adapter inside the enclosure.

One of these components has failed.

Try a different USB cable.

Try connecting to a different USB port on your computer.

Try connecting to a USB port on a different computer.

Take a "multi-meter" and measure both the voltage and amperage output from the AC adapter, and compare with the specifications on the label on the adapter.

Open the enclosure, and remove the disk-drive, and then connect it as a "slave" disk-drive in a desktop computer, to see if it works at all.

Purchase a new, compatible, disk-drive, and install it in the enclosure, to "revive" your external storage device.

Get the part-number and serial-number from the label on your disk-drive, and access the manufacturer's web-site, and use "check warranty status", to see if they will replace the device, at minimal cost to you.

There exist commercial "data recovery" services that can try to repair your device, just long-enough to rescue and copy your files.
For example, see: https://services.seagate.com/index.aspx?lng=en-US for a "no data - no charge guarantee".