My WD Passport Isn't Showing Up on My Desktop.

I have had zero problems with it, but yesterday I installed the Lion disk recovery program from Apple's support site in case I needed to reformat, which I was considering doing soon as my Macbook has been running super slow in the last week or two. Anyway, since then my Passport has completely disappeared from the desktop, though the WD SmartWare program that shows up when it's plugged in is there. I can see the drive in disk utility, but I can't actually access it, and iTunes can't find the audio files located on the drive anymore. I booted up WD SmartWare to try to suss out what was going wrong, and I can see the drive there, too, but it's saying that there isn't anything on it, which makes no sense. My stomach is already lurching at the idea of having to re-do my entire music collection that I've been working on for years, but even if I must do that, how do I get the drive to show up again?

Did you check the drive on any other pc/mac? I would do that before I enter panic mode. Also, did you check the finder if you can see the drive there? If it does not show on the desktop does not mean it is not connected. Let us know...

also, just curious - how much RAM does your computer have and how much disk space it remaining? Trying to figure out what might have caused the computer to be slow...