In other words the exact same thing happened to you? You lost everything and for no logical reason. Please note my drive is Western Digital too.
When mine went down, I contacted a couple of the computer gurus at the university where I work. Neither of them had ever heard of one suddenly saying it was unformatted, and all the material suddenly vanishing. I reformatted it, and now it sometimes makes a funny clicking sound when I start up the computer; one time the computer said it wasn't there, but upon reboot, it found it. I suspect it's shoddy workmanship and a physical problem with Western Digital.
I'm waiting to see what kind of Memorial Day sales are going on this weekend at Best Buy and CompUSA. I'll be looking to pick up a new drive (NOT Western Digital) then.
"Please note my drive is Western Digital too."
I had the exact same problems with Maxtor a few years ago. Wished I would have known about that hammer thing.
I didn't freak out about it too much as being a WD specific problem because I have 5 other computers with a total of 13 drives among them, and they are all Western Digital drives, and have been fine, some for many years at a time. WD drives have always seemed very solid. In fact, I still have a 6gb WD drive that started out in a Win98 (now win2k) machine back in 1999 working daily as the system disk for that machine.
I also back up each machines drives onto drives on the other machines, so I didn't lose more than a few weeks of non-critical data. Critical data always lives on mirrored (RAID1) drives here at the Vast Spodefly World Headquarters and Bunker CompoundTM.
We've lost a WD hard drive in the past also. We have had much better luck with our Seagate drives. :)