External HDD not recognized

I have a 1tb external hdd that i can't seem to find, on my desktop, in finder, in disk utilities or even the system profiler. it's got my 20gb itunes library and about 150 gigs worth of movies on it so i'd like to try to get it working again, without reformatting it if it's possible. It doesn't show up on either my ibook or my mac mini and it won't show up on my friend's windows laptop either, although when i did put the usb into the windows computer something popped up that said it was installing drivers and that it could be used. when i went to look for it it was nowhere to be found. the hdd is a smart drive and has a 100gb windows formatted partition, and a 800 gb mac partition and i don't use either for timemachine. it's been working fine since i got it, not even a hiccup and there have been no odd loud or unusual noises recently. and when i plug it into any computer it starts to spin up as it normally does. i've tried the usual check wires, turn off/on, restart all computers, nada. what is really distressing is the fact that the system profiler doesn't even recognize it so even if i wanted to i couldn't reformat it.
i would appreciate any insight. thanks.
Message was edited by: CortB

sorry just edited the original message, no i cannot see it in system profiler, on either mac, and i can't see it in device manager on the windows.

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External HDD not recognized after unsafe removal

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Hello JNotorious,
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
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In the future always backup your data regularly*:
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External HDD not recognized

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