My External Hard drive wont show up when plugged in

I have an external 500GB LaCie hard drive connected to my 13inch mac book 09. It is used to house all of my itunes library (11,000 songs+), a bunch of pictures and a few movies and random other things. It was working fine until I came home from work one day and an error message was on my computer saying that I had ejected a disk without properly disconnecting it (meaning my hard drive). My HD was still plugged into my computer and I never touched it. I tried everything from unplugging, rebooting, etc, and it still wont show up when I connect it to my computer. A day earlier I had my itunes playing for 8 hours while I was at work and I had been noticing over the past few days that my power supply was unusually loud but didn't think anything of it until this all happened! I would appreciate any advice as I would like to keep listening to all my music. Please help!

Ok in disk utility it says Format : MS-DOS (FAT32)
Sorry Im not sure what you mean by can it connect via firewire? Sorry I'm a bit useless with technology haha

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Ok in disk utility it says Format : MS-DOS (FAT32)
Sorry Im not sure what you mean by can it connect via firewire? Sorry I'm a bit useless with technology haha

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Disk Description : WD Elements 1023 Media                      Total Capacity : 500.11 GB (500,105,740,288 Bytes)
Connection Bus : USB                                                               Write Status : Read/Write
Connection Type : External                                                     S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
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Hello,
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Although my external drive shows in Disk Utility, it does not show in Finder.
And the Verify/Repair buttons are also greyed out.
Also, although the drive is 2TB. DU shows it as having Total Capacity of only 4.14GB! (Which should be the Free Space).
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I´m afraid to Erase in case I lose all my Data on the drive.
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My External Hard drive wont show up when plugged in

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