hi,
I am facing a similar problem. One fine day the drive stopped showing in My Computer. I am using windows 7 and tried it on another laptop with windows vista as well. I have a portable My Passport hard disk of 512 GB.
When I open disk management, it asks me to initialize disk 1 (which is my unallocated external hard disk) and when I try to it gives me a message saying that it is write protected.
I also tried using another cable to connect but even that doesnt help. The disk is showing when I try to safely remove hardware.
Please help!
Thanks in advance.