I just had this happen to me with a WD 3.0 TB My Book. The drive has been plugged into my computer for 2 years backing up along the way. Suddenly, it wouldn't show up in "My Computer" but would show up in device manager. Nothing ever happened to this drive, no bumps, falls. power surges, nothing. But just stopped being fully recognized. I removed the hard drive from the My Book enclosure and reconnected it. I noticed that the light went on, but the hard drive would not spin up. I then removed the circuit board and inserted the drive into the hot swap on my computer. Windows 7 said it was not initialized and asked me to do so. That would format the drive and erase my data. But I noticed that when I pulled the drive out of the hot swap, it was spinning fine, so I figured that the problem was in the circuit board. Looking closer, I noticed black areas on the board. I cleaned one large pad and hooked it up again. This time, the computer recognized the My Book, installed the drivers, but indicated there was still a problem - still wasn't spinning up. So I cleaned the rest of the board, and now it worked perfectly! So try cleaning the pad where the screw is, and the long pad next to the serial tag. Flip the circuit board over and clean the rectangular pad near the drive connector -that got the drive to be recognized. But on the drive itself, clean the circular E pads near the drive connector and you should be golden. Mine was a 3.0 TB, so the circuit board and pads on a different model may not be the same, but most likely, they will experience a similar issue. Hope this helps!
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