External hard drive trouble

I have had my WD 160 GB external hard drive for about a year now. It has worked fine, no problems. Two days ago, I left it on my desk. Today, I picked it up, plugged it into the USB port, and now it's not recognized. It spins and makes noises, and shows up in disk utility, but still isn't recognized. When I try to initialize the disk and repair it with disk repair, it won't let me. What has happened and how do I fix it?

Thanks in advance

Probably an electronics failure on the drive itself. The WD drives like most others have the controller and electronics on one board which is integrated on to the drive above the mechanism. If something on that board fails, you get what you experienced.

Your drive should still be under WD warranty. (I believe it's three years on most of their externals) Give WD support a call and ask for a RMA. They may ask you to run some diagnostics first. If the drive should prove to be defective, they'll replace it with either a new or refurbished one.

Regards.

Thanks so much!!