My passport hard drive has worked for years. Now when I plug it in, I get the tone that it connected and can feel the hard drive working and the light is on. I cannot find it in the list of items connected to the computer, but it does show up in device manager - and it says that the disk is not initialized.

Is there a way that I can fix this without losing the data?

I am waiting to hear the answer myself. I have the same issue. I took mine to two computer shops and they said there was nothing they could do for me.

I have mine sitting in the drawer, with all of my photos, files and "life" .

It seems odd to me. I know people who have had hard drive failures and taken their systems to computer shops where the shop will mirror the drive onto another drive. I would think if they could do such a thing with an internal hard drive, they should be able to do it with an external one as well. I would call around, you may have just found someone that doesn't have the ability.

Since you can see it in Disk Management, try a recovery program like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. The Free Edition has limitations but the Pro version (which isn't free) does not. I recently used the Pro version I downloaded to recover a "D" drive that went belly up for no reason. But it took for ever to recover the 250gig drive.