I have a similar problem as you. The drive has been running perfectly fine for the past week and a half and a couple of days ago, Windows 7 made the drive disconnected sound (I’ve been using it from a usb dock). I went to check under “My Computer” and sure enough, the drive wasn’t showing up. I shut down the usb dock and restarted it, Windows made teh drive connected sound, but wouldn’t show the drive under My Computer and after about 5 minutes, the same format message that you got came up for me as well. As of right now, Windows can’t even see the drive at all and it fails smart.
I dual boot this machine (laptop) and under Ubuntu 10.10 I can finally see the drive under Disk Utility, it is correctly identified as “WDC WD20 EARS-00MVWB0” and it can read the correct size of the drive. HOWEVER: the serial number listed is bogus and is a bunch of 8’s, it does not know the location or the write cache, tells me it’s not partitioned and the SMART Status says “Not Supported.” It lists the device as /dev/sdb which is correct but if I try “sudo fdisk -lu”, the device is not listed. On top of that, if I try to benchmark the drive in Disk Utilities it throws me an error saying “Error benchmarking drive, dev/sdb can’t be found” (can’t remember the exact wording), but I just tried 5 minutes ago and it’s now saying “Error benchmarking drive: the daemon is being inhibited.”
I have about 1.1TB used on it already of DV footage that I didn’t have a chance to backup (transferred from 2 other drives onto this one and was waiting for the second wd20ears to come in to back it up), so now I’m stuck trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
I think it may have something to do with a possibly corrupt GPT Partition Table, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet; still looking around.
@Torontonian: Your drive is listing a very high Reallocated Sector Count which is weird for a recently new drive, I think I’ve seen some others report the same issue. I don’t know if this is the same problem with my drive since I can’t benchmark it or do anything SMART related with it right now
edit: some extra info:
-smartctl -i /dev/sdb outputs:
----Smartctl open device: /dev/sdb [USB JMicron] failed: No such device or address
-GSMartControl sees the drive as /dev/sdb, “Unknown model” and cannot retrieve the SMART data either’’
-GParted can’t see the device and only lists my main boot disk
