Hardware Need Urgent Help With a Hard Drive

[MTSoph14]

My mother owns a 2.0 TB Western Digital hard drive, and last week it really screwed up
It lost it mounting!
looking at it in Windows says that the entire thing is unallocated and must be formatted, but using some unsuccessful mounting software, we found out that the data is still there.
But how can I access it?
Right now all I have is a PC with Ubuntu 12.10 installed on it.
Please help, my (& my brother's) entire life is on there in pictures and my mother will kill me if I can't find a way to help her!

 

[MTSoph14]

put it into the Ubuntu machine and the BIOS recognized it for what it is, but Ubuntu doesn't see the thing at all with the "sudo blkid" command

 

[Rydian]

If it's an external, break it open and take the actual harddrive out of it and stick it in the computer. The adapter might have just fucked up, it happens (they're generally built to lesser tolerances than the actually drive they house).

 

[MTSoph14]

If it's an external, break it open and take the actual harddrive out of it and stick it in the computer. The adapter might have just fucked up, it happens (they're generally built to lesser tolerances than the actually drive they house).

It was originally an external, but I have done that before making my original post, same thing happened.