Sorry for your loss Von.  I'm guessing that the Master Boot Record (MBR) is corrupt on your drive which is why it won't work.  It generally consumes the first few bytes of a drive and holds the partition tables on it.  It may be repairable (search Google) but I've never tried to do so.

I'd strongly recommend looking into an onsite backup/storage solution.  I run a Synology Diskstation in my house.  I have 4 2tb drives running in a RAID5 config.  I also run Synology's backup software on my PCs and they automatically backup up daily.