External Hardrive stopped working...

I have a WD 2 TB My Book Home Edition external hard drive, I have had it for about a year... it worked fine I had a little over 1 TB of data on the hard drive and after coming home from vacation when I reconnected my hard drive it would not mount. The message was "Hard disk not recognized by this computer" so I properly disconnected the hard drive and replugged it in and reconnected to iMac and still same thing. I have tried everything in the book it feels like and nothing is working, and of course I did not have all the info backup with time machine (I REGRET and beat myself up for not) so I need to recover the data and I am not sure what to do. I did run Data Rescue 3 and it said that there was nothing on the hard drive to recover. Of course I am panicking and I have been told to send it off for Data recovery but that is going to cost up to 2,000 and I just want to make sure that this is my last resort or is it hopeless and should I just seek counseling for all the lost pictures of my kiddos...LOL I did try opening the case and inserting hard drive directly in a hard drive docking station.... sorry this is so long I just would like any advice or help from all the MAC GURUS PLEASE....

 

Thanks that is kinda what I thought... THANKS for the quick response.