Great you have found the dino.

Now on to the problem, as it stands at the moment you have a "brick" containing your data.

You cannot currently access the data.

Do you want to track down and re-install everything you have on the external drive individually or do you want to try to recover the data en masse?

The user's in this hobby tend to be computer literate, many are quite knowledgeable and because of the wide disparity in hardware a broad range of problems has been encountered.

Chances are that someone has experience with the same problem you have so if the pertinent information is supplied there is a good expectation that the problem can be resolved.

What have you got to lose?