Wd passport essential se 1tb usb 3.0 not recognized by PC

I got this brief windows message after plugging in my drive to my ASUS UL80JT laptop. The only symtoms were the blinking LED light (one blink per second…rather slow, i say), and a smoothly humming hard drive inside (no clicks or sounds). I initially thought it was a power problem (as my mother’s Iomega drive happened like this due to lack of power), so l proceeded to plug it directly into my PC’s rear-end USB ports. Well, the light stopped blinking and turned solid white but the external drive still hummed smoothly and windows still displayed the same error. 

I then proceeded to pry open the clamshell to inspect for damages but there were no visible damages. The drive is still under warranty (I only bought it 4 months ago), but I wish to recover the data (personal photos and memories) inside. Is there any way to do that? The only thing I can match up to these symptoms is faulty firmware:
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-disk-failures.htm
which i was skeptical of faulty/corrupted firmware at first, but my school’s computer help desk said it was a probable controller error (since windows did not see the drive AT ALL, even under partitions and management).  I’ve only had this unit for 4 months and refuse to believe something like this happened so early…

At any case, is there any hope of recovering the data? It’s quite precious to me. I even dumped the unit into my freezer (triple zip-lock bags with plastic wrap) for 3 hours in hopes for a last ditch effort to recover some data. It was of no luck. Since it’s now a software error…can anyone help me? 

I also tested the cable by plugging in the exact Micro B cable from my friend’s Toshiba 3.0 drive - and the same problem occured. I hope for a quick response soon. Thanks in advance.