Why won't my external hard drive work?

Question

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium. I have a WD elements 1034 1TB external hard drive. It's been running fine for months now but today it stopped showing up in my computer. I tried a soft reboot and a hard reboot but it still didn't work.
It makes kind of a buzzz-beep sound repeatedly as it starts up which I don't remember it doing before, but windows makes the usb connect sound when I plug it in, it shows up in devices and printers and it says it's working fine; When I go into disk management though it says that the device has not been initialized and immediately asks if I want to initialize it but then tells me that it can't because the device is write protected. I went into regedit to remove the write protection but the StorageDevicePolicies tab didn't exist. I created it, created the "WriteProtect" and set the value to 1, then I restarted my computer, reopened regedit and reset the write protect to 0 but I'm getting the same "device is write protected" problem when I try to initialize the disk.
I can find the same problem on a lot of message boards and get walked through to the regedit sequence but the people keep saying that it hasn't helped them to which there is never a reply. Is this the end of the road?

Answer 1

download and burn the WDC DIAGS Iso

remove the hard drive

temporarily disconnect all drives in your pc

fit the external drive into your pc as the PRIMARY drive



boot the diags cd



diagnose it, and pray it can repair it

Answer 2

If it is an external hard drive you can download device doctor from google and scan all your hard drives for best drivers.

Answer 3

try to use hard drive on a different.if it won't work there its the drive