External harddrive not found anymore

[lawliet]

Hi there. I don't know if anyone can help me with this but it's a really baffling problem!

Recently purchased a month ago a WD External USB 1TB HD, which we began using with no problems whatsoever.

Had files on it, they ran from it, etc. Today whilst switching from my laptop running Win 7 to my partners laptop running Win XP for some reason to harddrive froze and on rebooting the laptop it seems to not find the harddrive anymore under My Computer, even if it detects new hardware etc.

I've tried and checked BOTH laptops, and the problem is the same. On Win 7 I downloaded the WD Diagnosis Program for disk drives.. and the drive check failed. Although it's detected under device manager, if I go to disk management on Win7 it seems to be unallocated and I don't really know enough about hard drives to fiddle around with it, plus the fact my laptops quite new and I dont wanna do something wrong, haha.

Any advice? It should still be under warranty but if its not broken then I don't want to have to send it back...

[Networks]

If WD diagnostics are telling you the drive is bad then RMA the drive back to WD for warranty replacement. You can use the "search" on this forum and get a feel for how many are having issues with these large capacity drives 1TB 1.5TB 2TB etc they are very fragile and don't seem to last too long and don't seem to hold up well

[sobeit]

plug it in and go into disk management and see if the drive shows there.

right click computer, click on manage, then diskmanagement. If it shows in the right column, try assigning a drive letter to it. If not, then most likely if it is still under warranty, get a replacement.