WD USB hard drive showing as local disk

I plugged my WD "my passport" 5oogb hard drive into USB yesterday and it showed up as local disk on my computer with 0Gb used and 0Gb available. In disk manager it shows up as 500GB WD harddrive but in RAW format with 1 partition in use.I cannot carry out disk checkker as windows cannot access hard drive. I have tried using minitool data recovery and it shows as no disk recognised please insert disk. I carried out testdisk and it could not find any partitions on it. When i plug it into windows i hear the connection beep and the hard drive power light continually flashes, the hard drive is spinning as can feel it and no clicking on other noises heard. I have tried changing drive name on disk manager made no effect. When i try to run CHKDSK through DOS it says system cannot find the file specified. Please help as i have all my son pictures from birth to now which is 6 years on it and no other copies of them

hopefully these will give some more info of problems

RAW on external HDD's normally mean it's been disconnected improperly 1 too many times...
Partition Recovery software may do the trick but none of the good ones are Free...

It appears for what ever reason the hard drive is now being recognized by my laptop and all files ar visible for the time being, I am currently moving everything from the hard drive to save as much as possible. The removal issues both replies raised could be possible the last time it worked I shut down laptop and forced the shutdown of my computer to enable laptop to complete shut down maybe this is what has caused it. NAV197707 i dont know what cmd prompt admin mode is so no I havent tried that(if you dont mind explaining it to me i would happily try it. The issue I now have is mega super sow transfer rate on USB currently getting between 40Kb/s and maximum of 600Kb/s so copying the 365Gb of data is gonna take a very long time any ideas on this would be grateful appreciated.

To run cmd in admin mode here is the link, Start a Command Prompt as an Administrator. after the box appears write down chkdsk e: (or what ever your drive name is. That will show any errors in the drive, if bad sectors are shown type chkdsk e: /f
Let me know how u get on. This solution worked for me as I had a similar problem as yours

I am having the exact same probleme!

Why did your Hard drive was recognized after? do i need to wait? how long?

you don't need to wait long 30 min approx.
all my files were there. try my solution tell me if it works.

Okay.

So when i enter the command "chkdsk e: " (my hard drive appear under disk e: aswell), i press enter. and i wait.

It does not do anything.... Is this normal? sorry it is like the first time, im using the command prompt

should do something when you press enter, try chkdsk c: to see if anything happens then try chkdsk e: and enter later