My Book Essential Drive - 2TB won't mount on mac

I am having a problem getting my Mybook essential drive to mount on my MacBook pro 2,5 Ghz intel core 2 duo, running OS 10.6.8.

It has been working just fine since I bought it , 3 months ago, until a couple of days ago when it dismounted itself and gave an alert saying my drive had been dismounted improperly. It did this twice and then didn’t mount on the desktop again.

I have tried all the usual fixes of restarting, disconnecting, fixing permissions etc etc, but cannot get it to mount.

I have also tried connecting it to another mac, but no joy there either.
When I connect it now, the drive opens & shows up in WD quickview, where it says space available is 100%, although the drive is actually half full of back-up data.
When I open WD smartware (1.3.3.8) the drive shows up, but I cannot select it. On the home Tab  It tells me the drive has 0KB total, with files = 0 KB & 0 KB free.
On the Settings Tab, Drive setup section, it shows the drive size as 681 Mb (???) with firmware revision 1.008. it tells me to update the firmware for the drive, but when I download & run the WD Firmware updater it cannot find the drive to update, it just gets stuck on ‘scanning Drives to update’ and cannot find the drive.
Disk utility cannot recognise the drive, but System profiler can ‘see’ it in the USB section where it gives the following info:

Product ID:    0x1130
  Vendor ID:    0x1058  (Western Digital Technologies, Inc.)
  Version:    10.08
  Serial Number:    5743415A4131393638363330
  Speed:    Up to 480 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer:    Western Digital
  Location ID:    0xfa200000 / 2
  Current Available (mA):    500
  Current Required (mA):    2

I have tried to find the solution online, but to no avail. Does anyone have any ideas what I should try next, or is the drive fried ?

Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

Regards,

if you tried it with another usb cable, and if the drive is spinning when plugged in, it’s either severly corrupted (but that would show up in disk utilities), or the hardware is damaged and needs to be replaced.  unfortunately, if you need the data, you’re most likely looking at data recovery, unless someone else has a better idea.

Thanks for all advice,

I have now started  the rprocess to get the drive replaced