HP 5000s Personal Media Device no longer recognized by Vista

[rmoden]

Hi, I have a 500GB media drive I got a couple of weeks ago. I hooked it up, it seemed to work fine, and I moved all my large files over to it out of confidence that it was working. A few days later, I connect the device and every 20 seconds the message comes up that the USB device is not recognized. This device is holding many digital copies of movies from DVD's that they do not allow you to re-download due to copyright, as well as many home movies. I would very much appreciate any advice on how to make the device recognizable and usable again, and if not, just how to recover these files.

I don't know if this is valuable information, but when looking up solutions, a lot of people seemed to have the same message because they didn't push the device into the USB slot enough on the side of their computer tower. I don't even know if my device can do that, as I am instead connecting it with the included USB cable to my laptop.

As well, the fan seems to have stopped working and the yellow light is never on, except to flash immediately whenever the USB cable is connected to the laptop. I'm guessing this is probably related.

[rmoden]

Also, I followed these steps, to no avail (though I had to figure out how to do some of the steps in Vista versus the instructions for XP):

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00220412&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=ca&product=3226521&lang=en

The device showed up in the first Disk drives list, but never appeared as an Unallocated disk in the Computer Management - > Disk Management window. Instead, it just said it was an unknown disk or something similar. Thus I never got it to appear in My Computer.