Unable to read from 500GB External HDD

I have a Western Digital MyBook 500GB External USB Drive and I'm running Windows Vista Home Basic.

This is exactly what happened:

When I wasn't around, my brother decided to unplug the drive from my PC and use it on his own PC. When I was back, I decided to shut down my computer for an unrelated reason. I then realized that he took the drive so I unplugged it from his PC (without safely removing it...) and plugged it back into my own while it's off.

When I start my system back up, it stays stuck at a black screen after the Windows loading bar. If I unplugged the drive, Windows continues loading. After Windows loads, if I plug the drive back in, Windows will freeze until I unplug the drive.

I thought maybe Ubuntu could help with something, so I shut down the computer and booted Ubuntu from my USB Flash Drive. Ubuntu is able to detect the drive and the filesystem. It also manages to mount the filesystem but when I double-click on the mounted folder, nothing happens.

I tried GParted but it refuses to start. I tried running 'dosfsck' and it says something about boot sector and backup sector not matching so I decided to overwrite the boot sector with the backup. I still can't read from the drive. I'm now running 'sudo dosfsck -av /dev/sdg1' to see what it can do but I'm not sure if it's even doing anything due to the lack of any progress indicator.

Does anyone know of any way to get the drive back working or at least recover data from the drive?

Will it boot into safe mode with the drive connected?

To boot into safe mode:

1. When you power on the computer repeatedly press the F8 key on you keyboard.
2. You should get a text based screen that gives you the options Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking, Safe mode with Command Prompt etc.
3. Select "Safe Mode" and press enter.
4. The computer will start into a reduced functionality mode.