external hard drive problems

a couple of months ago i bought a new hard drive for my laptop, so i decided to make the old hard drive external. i did and it worked until last month when one day it started making some weird noises. windows will make the noise it makes when you plug something in but thats it. nothing else happens. i tried to uninstall and install again the drive but then it says that the drive will not start. it shows the drive on device manager but it has the yellow question mark. then when i click properties it says it will not start. i have about 20 gigs of files that i really need and i dont know what else to do.... can someone help me/????

If the hard drive began to make noises, it is beginning, or already has failed. There's not too much left you could do about it if this is the problem...

Just curious...do you see the drive in device manager, or just the external addaptor? You normally should see both if all is working well.