Where would the best place be to take an external harddrive to be repaired?

Err, where did you buy it from? Who manufactures it? Sometimes they can fix such occurences, though if all else fails there should be a phone book (shudder, analog pages?) that perhaps lists a computer repair shop?

It’s a Western Digital 500GB that was bought (I believe) off amazon…

What’s wrong with it? Is the case itself broken or is the drive not being recognized / making noise? If it isn’t being recognized, any decent computer repair place can tell you if it’s just the USB / Firewire cable or the drive itself. If it’s making noise, back up whatever you’ve got on it because the heads are going to commit suicide soon. You can’t really fix a drive that’s already started to make noise (at least not for the price of three or four new ones).

@Joey: It’s not making noise, but it’s just not mounting at all. It feels like it’s spinning normally… I guess it may be the firewire. I thought about taking it to Best Buy because they have Geek Squad guys, but you have to pay just to get them to look at it, which sucks. The case looks like it may be a little damaged (one edge looks like it doesn’t fit together right), but I don’t know if that has anything to do with it.

I don’t know what kind of computers you’ve got available to work on, but if it’s a standard 3.5” HDD in a plastic case you might open it up and hook it up via SATA and see if it works then. If so, Firewire’s the problem.