Has My External Drive Been Wiped Out?

So I have a Western Digital external hard drive that I bought in anticipation of the Leopard release in October, 2007. And it's generally worked well, until now. After being away for a few days, I turned on my iMac and the external didn't pop up. So I unplugged it and plugged it in again and after doing this, nothing came up.
Finally, a message comes up, hours later saying that the disk couldn't be initialized and the like and Disk Utility pops up. And on Disk Utility, my external is popped up... yet it shows it has the full amount of space available and that it isn't formatted.
Keep in mind that I'm a musician, I record, produce and actually put all of those files on the external to prevent myself hassle and heartache from the iMac's drive going out.
But now that this has happened... has my external wiped out? You have no idea how much I am praying to hear the words: "No."
Thanks!

First thing to do is reset the USB chip set on the mother board. Unfortunately, when you power down the computer there is always a bit of power still applied to the motherboard to keep things alive and this usually includes powering the ports to do stuff like detect when a device is plugged in or wants to wake up the computer. The downside of this is when a bus/port chipset goes into a weird state, locks up, etc., simply power cycling (shutdown & restart) the computer won't work.
So first thing to try is resetting the chipset and to do this you have to power down the computer and completely unplug the computer from the wall power (unplug the power cord to your Mac). Also unplug everything from the Mac's ports (USB, FW, Ethernet, etc.) to make sure no parasitic power is still there to keep the chipset alive. Now let it sit for a minute (give those big power caps in there time to discharge). Now reattach the keyboard & mouse, plug the power cord back in, & start up the Mac. Now see if your USB ports work any better.
Best of luck!
Patrick
What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire or USB device
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1317?viewlocale=en_US

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If anyone has been helpful to you, please show your appreciation by clicking the button inside of their post. Please click here and read, along with the threads to which it links, for helpful information to guide you as you proceed. I always recommend that you treat your BlackBerry like any other computing device, including using a regular backup schedule...click here for an article with instructions.
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