HELP! WD Passport External Drive stopped being recognized by my Mac

This happened out of the blue. It worked fine for 2 years. No problems. Then today when I plug it into my Mac, I hear it spin for about a minute but my Mac won't recognize it. The drive doesn't show up at all, anywhere, including the Disc Utility. The external drive also appears to be in fine working condition --- I have never seen it overheat, and I have never heard any noises coming form it.
The WD Passport External Drive uses a Firewire 800 port, and my Mac notebook is a late 2011 model, and it is running OS X 10.9.5.
The only thing that was oddly coincidental was that I noticed this after I installed an update for iTunes that looked like it involved more than just iTunes (I saw something about a "Safari patch" and other stuff in the bundle too). I'm thinking this was just a coincidence though, and I'm not even sure the external HD wasn't working even before that, but who knows.
Anyone have any ideas???

Some more information...
So I was able to test the external HD using the USB port (instead of the Firewire port), and also tested it on a separate computer, and I always experienced the same problem. The external HD starts trying to spin and connect to my Mac, but after trying unsuccessfully to do so after about 20 seconds it gives up and stops/powers-down.
Since I've tested it using different ports, different connecting wires, and different computers, I'm thinking chances are the problem is with the hardware of the external HD itself (i.e. worst case scenario).
Before shipping my external HD off to get repaired or to get the data recovered, can anyone think of any reason why it would be a software issue? I read something about updating the "firmware" but I have no idea what that is. I guess I'm still holding out hope that the drive isn't fried because when I plug it in it does try to spin and start up instead of just remaining dead.
Any ideas at all are welcome at this point.
Thanks

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WD Passport External Drive stopped being recognized by my Mac

This happened out of the blue. It worked fine for 2 years. No problems. Then today when I plug it into my Mac, I hear it spin for about a minute but my Mac won't recognize it. The drive doesn't show up at all, anywhere, including the Disc Utility. The external drive also appears to be in fine working condition --- I have never seen it overheat, and I have never heard any noises coming form it. I also tried a different Firewire, and the same thing happened, so that's not the problem.
The WD Passport External Drive uses a Firewire 800 port, and my Mac notebook is a late 2011 model, and it is running OS X 10.9.5.
The only thing that was oddly coincidental was that I noticed this after I installed an update for iTunes that looked like it involved more than just iTunes (I saw something about a "Safari patch" and other stuff in the bundle too). I'm thinking this was just a coincidence though, and I'm not even sure the external HD wasn't working even before that, but who knows.
Anyone have any ideas???

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HELP! WD Passport External Drive stopped being recognized by my Mac

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