Cannot Access Toshiba External Hard Drive On MacBook Pro

I have had this Toshiba portable external hard drive for about 3-4 years now. It is powered through the USB port (USB 3.0 I believe, but maybe it's older and is only USB 2.0). All of a sudden my hard drive will not show up on my Mac or PC to be accessed (on the PC it says "device descriptor request failed" and doesn't show at all). At first I thought it was because I updated to Maverick when it was first available, but realized I had been accessing my hard drive and using time machine with it since then. Right now there are a lot of files on this hard drive I would like access to so I do not want to format the drive at all. Furthermore, the drive appears in disk utility and I did the verifying and repairing disk functions in disk utility and they were successful, but nothing was actually fixed. Also, the light is constantly flickering white, sometimes it would be solid blue, but recently only flickering white.
I have also refereed to this discussion thread, however, in this person's situation their drive does not appear at all where mine actually does. The solutions provided were to try a new cable or that there is not enough power being provided from the computer through the USB cord into the hard drive. I have never had this issue and have tried both cords made by Samsung and one from a WD My Passport. Please let me know if I should try the powered USB hub and I will, I just don't understand why the power going to the drive changed all of a sudden since I've been using it for years.
I have already ordered a new external hard drive so I can back up my computer, but I still need the files on this hard drive. Luckily it seems to still be alive which makes me think there is a way to get the files. So if anyone can help me figure out a solution to this problem without losing my files that would be excellent.
Thank you. I will try to provide you with any additional information you would like to know.

Since you can see the drive in Disk Utility, select it, go to the Restore tab, and use that to copy the data to a new drive. Note the warning on reformatting the destination drive - make sure there is no data on the new drive.

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Cannot Access Toshiba External Hard Drive On MacBook Pro

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