2tb western digital external hard drive does not show in computer

Western Digital 2TB My Book Essential.

Not going to mention my computer specs because I really doubt it has anything to do with my laptop.

When I plug in my external hard drive I get a sound that it's connected but it does not show in "My Computer" - someone told me to go to Disk Management and check if it shows up. It does show and gives me the option of "Initialize Disk - You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it. Select disks: Disk 1.

Use the following partition style for the selected disks:

MBR (Master Boot Record)
GPT (GUID Partition Table)"

But when I choose either MBR or GPT I get a message saying

"The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error." for the MBR

"The system cannot find the file specified." for GPT.

Any ideas what I should do next? I tried searching in Google for the errors but nothing matches with what problem I'm having.