If the USB-SATA bridge board in your WD enclosure has an Initio INIC-1607E chip, then your data are hardware encrypted, whether or not you have set a password. This is why the PC failed to recognise the partitions. Now that you have initialised your drive, you have wiped the encrypted partition information, but hopefully your encrypted data are still intact.
Your easiest course of action is to obtain another MyBook Elite and swap the drives. Then run TestDisk or “Partition Find and Mount”. Hopefully your data will be accessible. If not, then one commercial tool that has worked for others is “Active File Recovery for Windows”.
That said, a failed firmware update usually causes the Initio chip to identify itself as an “Initio default controller”. In this mode it has prepared itself to receive a firmware download. If this is the case, then you should be able to update the firmware simply by repeating the procedure, ensuring that no other application is attempting to access the device at the same time. The firmware is written to an 8-pin serial flash memory chip on the bridge board, not to the drive itself.
You can see the Initio device using Microsft’s UVCView utility:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe
TestDisk:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Partition Find and Mount:
http://findandmount.com
Active File Recovery for Windows
http://www.file-recovery.net/
