I am having issues with my 2Tb elements WD external hard drive which has been causing me great distress. I have been using the HD the past six months without issue it had been working great right up until today. I unplugged the hard drive as a normally would and went over to a friends house to transfer some files. however when i tried connecting it to their computers initiially the hard drive didn’t show up and after about five minutes a pop up came up informing me that the drive needed to be formatted in order to be accessed. I REALLY do not want to frormat my hard drive as it is almost full 1.5Tb of T.V shows and movies some of which are very hard to find and the thought of re-collecting all of these shows makes me want to cry. My friend has an identicle hard drive so whilst there i switched the hard drive cases and cables to ensure it wasnt the port or the cable, this did not change anything same reformatting messgae came up. So I stopped trying to use the HD on my friends computer and quickly returned home to see if the hard drive was doing the same thing on my computer, i plugged it in and it appeared to be working as the WD logo came up (My computer has significantly more RAM than my friends, i have 8Gb whereas he has only 2Gb both systems are running windows 7 i do not know if this is relevent or not). unfortunatly the HD was still not working as i could only access some of the files and some others would cause a pop-up to appear saying i/o device error. So i ran a drive check which i left running for about 4 hours it eventually froze about three quarters of the way though so i cancelled it. I decided to give it a break after this because this was really stressing me out and i kept getting links to programs that scanned my computer and then told me that i had to pay for them to fix the problems. Then i came back an hour or so later to find my HD was fully accessable 
unfortunatly it was running extreemly slow and opening any thing was takiing about 3 or so minutes. transferring data on and off the drive was also running ridiculously slow, at about 200 kbps. I ran the drive check again and this time it finished in about 20 minutes, this did not make any difference however. I also tried running the HD in perfomance mode this also did not make any difference so i reverted to the default. once again i took a break this time i turned my computer off and unplugged the HD. But when i came back and started the system up it was even worse! the HD does not even show up on the my computer screen now but i can locate the HD through the devices menu and apparently is is disabled. This device is disabled. (Code 22) is displayed in the HD properties, when i try to enable the device i just get a message saying windows was unable to enable the device. Please help me this HD is practically the most important thing in my life right now and i need to be able to acess those files. Only other info that may be relevent is that yesterday there was a file that had a padlock on it (i cannot remember what it was called) in the hard drive that i deleted and since deleting it i emptied my recycle bin. I did test the hard drive after moving the file by unplugging it and such, it seemed to have no effect at the time. Sorry about poor gramma/termenologies i’m a bit of a noob and fairly distraught over the whole ordeal. Any help and i will love you for life 
*Update i managed to re-enable the Hard drive by uninstalling it. The hard drive now shows up in the My computer screen as H: but it also says i need to format disc…*
