External Hard Drive won't load, Disk Utility and System Profiler crashes,

I've had the WD 1TB Passport for Mac for about a year now and as of this afternoon, my MacBook Pro stopped recognizing it. It's encrypted so when I plugged it in, my computer asked me for my password, but then it said there was an error and wouldn't mount. After restarting the computer, the password prompt for my external drive didn't even pop up. I can hear the hard drive spinning and the light flashes for a good 30 seconds before going solid. I have tested my USB ports with flash drives and they are reading them just fine. I tried to run  Disk Utility but it goes into the never-ending loading mode. So then I go to the "About my Mac" page and clicked on storage, and the profiler crashed (never-ending loading). Can anyone help me? It was working just fine up until today. I even tried different Micro USB chords on it. This drive is incredibly important to me and I would appreciate not having to erase anything from it (kinda defeats the purpose of backing up a computer if the external hard drive is the one needing the backup).
I have a
Mid 2010 13in MacBook Pro
OS X 10.8.2
1TB WD Passport for Mac

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