My external hard drive stopped working after plugging it into a OS X Lion mac...

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I own a snow leopard macbook pro, and my external hard drive was working fine for years until yesterday when i plugged it into my friend's new OS X Lion mac pro to transfer some files.
As soon as i plugged it in, a message popped up on the screen to ask whether or not i wanted to set this drive as time machine, and i clicked on no, then it completely disappeared from my friend's mac. i thought maybe it doesn't work on the new mac since it had usb 3.0 and my external hard drive is for usb 2.0.

Then today i plugged it into my own macbook pro to watch movies in my external hdd only to find that it is not recognized. it doesn't even appear on disk utility, i tried resetting PRAM, but nothing seems to work...
I have so many important files in this hard drive so i can't afford to lose all the data.
Can someone please help me with this problem T_T????
 
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Blue Mountains NSW Australia
Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
G'day and welcome to the forums.

First up Macs do not run USB3 unless a third party PCI-E card is installed. Even if they did USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2. With the drive connected to your MBP go into Disk Utility and see if it appears on the list of drive. You may have to 'mount' the drive. Have you checked the Finder Preferences to ensure show external drives is selected?

Also make sure when removing the drive to drag it to the Trash prior to unplugging.
 

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