Time machine "cannot be found"

My time machine disk "cannot be found". It is plugged in via USB, but doesn't show up on the finder. I have tried checking the cable, turning the disk on and off, shutting down the entire computer and turning it back on, plugging it into a different Mac, and nothing I do it working.
Is the disk dead? Is there anyway I can retrieve my pictures from it?

There is a couple of thigns you can attempt, first is open Disk Utility (Applications - Utilities - Disk Utilities) and see if the disk is seen. If it is then first do both a SMC and PRAM resets following the instructions in https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3603, repeat each reset 2-3 times. Please post with the results

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