[ddouglass]

Hard drives fail. That is just a fact of life and it isn't just external ones that die. Because they are a mechanical device then just like your car parts wear-out. Icouldn't tell you how many drives I have had fail over my 20+ years of working on personal computers, but it has been many.
The lesson here is to have more than one copy of your library. Either get two identical drives and copy the files to both or have another copy on another computer. If all else fails then you should have your CDs to be able to reload them.
Many of the MTU users even have a backup computer that they can use if their primary show computer decides to quit on them.
The question is how did it fail? Did it stop spinning up (silence), or is it just failing to read the data, or the power won't turn on (power lite)? What exactly did it do? Have you taken it to a computer repair shop to see if it can be fix/data recovered?