Help! External hard drive (WD) doesn't show up anywhere (except for in System Information)...

Hi,
My WD hard drive (160 gb, 3-4 years old) all of a sudden won't show up in Disk Utility or Finder.
Prior to this, I got an error message, saying something like "back up your data and reformat the disk", and I bought myself a new hard drive (a Verbatim) for this. When I connected the two hard drives, the WD wouldn't show up anywhere, except for in System Information, where the following message is displayed under "USB":
External HDD    :
  Product ID: 0x0702
  Vendor ID: 0x1058  (Western Digital Technologies, Inc.)
  Version: 1.02
  Serial Number: ????????????????????????
  Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer: Western Digital
  Location ID: 0x14200000 / 9
  Current Available (mA): 500
  Current Required (mA): 0
My Macbook Pro is a 11.1, with Mavericks installed.
I have all the recordings of my band's new album on this drive, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

I'd have to agree with WZZZ. That sounds like either a bad connection, bad cable, or faulty supply. The port could be bad as well but the cable either being bad or not properly plugged in or maybe even worn out. When the "disk ejected" message shows up it's usually because somehow the cable was yanked out of the system while it was plugged in. Intermittenet connections in the cable, particularly in supply lines between the drive and the unit can cause this to happen as well...it's as if you unplugged the external hard drive from the system for a very short time, but the system still picks it up and sees it as bad.
If worse comes to worse, download the hard drive troubleshooting book in the downloads section at:
http://scsc-online.com

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