WD My Passport Essential Uninitialized and not recognized by PC

[asaid]

My 1 TB WD My Passport Essential USB 3.0 HDD was working flawlessly for the past year, suddenly my PC stopped recognizing it and it the disk management tool of  Windows 7, the disk is listed but it says that the disk is not initialized.

My PC runs Windows 7 32-bit, I was told by some that the problem could be due to a corruption to the driver or the MBR.

I have though tried numerous times to uninstall and reinstall the driver, and tried to fix the MBR using multiple tools.

Is there any way I could fix this issue, as I have been searching the web for a solution and couldn’t find any.

[Kieren]

It is pretty certain that your data is still there. For some reason, Windows is not seeing the partition. Clearly, you don’t want to initialize the drive. Here are some steps you can try in order of complexity.

1. Follow this guide to cleaning up USB drivers-
   http://www.techspot.com/community/topics/usb-drive-or-flash-problems-how-to-cleanup-and-remove-old-usb-storage-drivers.145884/ . You are going to need this download- http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/drivecleanup.zip
2. If the cleanup procedure does not fix your situation, you will need to try accessing the drive outside of Windows. Download System Rescue CD here- http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage . This will allow you to boot to a Linux Live system and examine/copy your drive. There are instructions for burning an ISO image to CD, or for creating a bootable USB flash drive. There are also instructions for the various utilities which are included in the package.
3. The safest approach IMO, is to copy anything you want from the drive to another drive. Once your data is safe, you can return to Windows, and do a new partition and format on the drive.
4. A good starting point would be to run WINDLG on the drive to assess its condition. Get it here- http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=702&sid=3 by clicking the Download button. Don’t worry that this page refers to a Blue drive. The utility is the same for all. If the drive gets a clean bill of health on the Quick Test, you can proceed to Disk Management, initialize, partition, and format the drive.
5. If Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows (WinDLG) reports problems, you should determine if it is still under warranty here- http://support.wdc.com/ . If it is, start the RMA process.