Seagate HDD not being recognized by my computer Please Help!

Hello,


I gotta Seagate USB 2.0 500 GB Expansion drive. Its been working just fine on my computer up until a couple days ago. For some reason the latest windows 7 update must have messed up the formatting of it, now its not being recognized on my laptop at all. Shows up as a local disk...very frustrating. I've tried almost everything I could think of. I've tried assigning a partition letter in disk management, uninstalling the software, trying it on different computers, system restore...nothing. I don't wanna result in having to reformat it and lose what I got. Could somebody please help me???