win7 Please help - Externel Drive acting weird

[IbSta]

Hey Neowin,

My home server died after a power outage. I had 3 drives die on me. My Windows drive, Family drive and my pagefile drive (not too worried about this one). I had made back-ups...locally and well after the OS drive died so did my RAID so all my drives now show up as offline and with a red X in drive management. I had made a backup on October 29th, 2012 onto an external drive. When I tried to restore using the recovery console Windows would see the image on the drive but all attempts to actually copy date to my drives failed so I was forced to buy 3 new drives and reinstall windows. As it stands I've lost all my family photos and I urgently want to get them back from the stupid external drive. This drive is about 3 years old. I see it has 3 .vhd images one is 365 GB which is the one that has all my family photos on and I desperatly want to get it off that drive but copying it fails. Using drive management to attach the VHD fails as well. I can open the drive on my computer and see the contents but when I try copying anything off the drive just spins and stops, the little red activity light flashes blue and red then stops at red and I have to turn the external off and back on. I have tried putting the external drive into my other computer that has a hot swap bay and my computer sees the drive in Drive managment but its got no drive letter and shows up as 456 GB free. I dont know what to do I'm just so worried. Any help would be great. I have also tried doing a check disk and it just stops, no activity on the hard drive. I can feel it vibrate though so it's not dead. Any suggestions?

Thank you!