Toshiba external hard drive suddenly stopped functioning

Hello, I have a Toshiba Canvio Basic 1TB external hard drive. I'm an aspiring game developer/artist and I have several years' worth of work on it.

Today, the hard drive suddenly just stopped working. It was working just fine this morning, but when I plug it in now, it is completely undetectable. File manager, device manager, nor hard disk partitioner can find it.

Interestingly, when the hard drive DID work, it had a blue light that always flashed when my PC was on. However, now the blue light constantly stays on when plugged in instead of blinking, so I know the hard drive is at least receiving power - thus making it unlikely that it's an issue with its cable. Also, it appears that when I try to boot the PC from a different drive, it becomes detectable under the name "hard disk" (I'm actually not 100% sure if that's my external hard drive, which is the one I'm having issues with, or my internal hard drive, but I think it's my external one as it's under the USB section). When I try to boot it from that drive, though, it fails presumably due to me lacking an OS to boot it with on the drive.

I've searched all around online, and this is essentially my last ditch attempt to see if I can somehow fix it before I search for file recovery options. I don't turn to forums often, so I apologize if I didn't provide enough info/didn't do something right. I foolishly neglected to make back-ups most of the time, so if I lose the information on this, I'm going to be set back by quite a while. I guess one could say I'm pretty desperate.





System Configuration: Android / Chrome 102.0.5005.125