Western Digital external hard drive problem

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
10

Exact same issue.  Tuesday the drive worked fine, I was out of work yesterday, tried plugging it into both work and home computers using every USB port available with nothing.  Windows “recognizes” the drive and even says that it is “installed” but nothing shows up in “My Computer.”  Work computer has WD Smartware and when that opens up it simply says that there is no WD partition.  Drive was not password protected, just stopped working.  Need help!  Updating firmware tells me I need to format the drive… there has to be a better way.