HELP?! External Hard Drive stopped registering?!

Hi all,
I use a Western Digital 1TB External hard drive to back up two of the MacBooks in my family, but also to carry a few heavy files like movies, photos and a couple of Adobe CS6 projects. A couple of weeks ago my hard drive play up a little, I plugged it in as usual to carry out a couple of backups and file transfers and oddly it did not appear on the desktop nor in the finder, so I unplugged and plugged it back in again, still nothing so I decided to have a quick browse through Apple Support Communities (At the time I had totally forgotten about Disk Utilities and all that.) Just when I thought I may have found a fix I just went to my desktop to start doing something else, Volia!! Out of the blue it was on my desktop again and was actually starting a time machine backup. So as you do, I didn't think anything of it and just put it down to glitches.
Last night I decided it would be a good time to do a TM backup, plugged the WD drive in, again no joy, so I went to Disk Utility to verriy and repair the drive and as it does it shows the drive and underneath all if the partition assosiated with it, now the drive was showing up fine however the partition was grayed out, When I try to repair the drive I get this message:
If anyone has any suggestions they would be much appreciated, also I think the WD drive is still in warrenty, so if anyone could help me explain to WD what exactly is happening, much appreciated...
EDIT: The External drive is doing its usual humming and vibrating and the light flashes as normal when connected.
Thanks
-medyachtsman

EDIT: The External drive is doing its usual humming and vibrating and the light flashes as normal when connected.
That doesnt mean anything actually. The spindle/rotor is the LAST thing to die in any HD
Its possible you have (very common failure) dead SATA card, however WD is infamous for making SATA cards and controller boards ONE PIECE, in which case youre outta luck.
read about same here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
This is why you never ever NEVER have one backup, rather 2 minimum redundancy copies of your data.
always.
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection
The Tragedy that will be, the tragedy that never should be
Always presume correctly that your data is priceless and takes a very long time to create and often is irreplaceable. Always presume accurately that hard drives are extremely cheap, and you have no excuse not to have multiple redundant copies of your data copied on hard drives and squirreled away several places, lockboxes, safes, fireboxes, offsite and otherwise.
Hard drives aren't prone to failure…hard drives are guaranteed to fail (the very same is true of SSD). Hard drives dont die when aged, hard drives die at any age, and peak in death when young and slowly increase in risk as they age.
Never practice at any time for any reason the false premise and unreal sense of security in thinking your data is safe on any single external hard drive. This is never the case and has proven to be the single most common horrible tragedy of data loss that exists.
Many 100s of millions of hours of lost work and data are lost each year due to this single common false security. This is an unnatural disaster that can avoid by making all data redundant and then redundant again. If you let a $60 additional redundant hard drive and 3 hours of copying stand between you and years of work, then you've made a fundamental mistake countless 1000s of people each year have come to regret.

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https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks?view=discussions
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro
Mac OS X Forum
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os?view=discussions
This forum deals with a desktop/tower 65lb Mac Pro
http://www.apple.com/support/macpro

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Kappy wrote:
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Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.
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HELP?! External Hard Drive stopped registering?!

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