Hard Drive Not Recognized

My Western Digital MyBook 1.5 GB has recently stopped working. I spins for about 20 seconds, then stops. It is not recognized in windows explorer, but it is recognized in device manager and disk management.

Under disk management it says that it has 2047.35 GB unallocated space.
It also says the disk is unknown and not intitalized. When trying
to intitalize the drive, it says "The media is write protected".

I have tried swapping usb cables, running safe mode, and freezing it.

Any help would be amazing! Thanks!

Picture of Disk Management
http://i55.tinypic.com/dyaznl.jpg

Picture of Windows Explorer and drive properties
http://i55.tinypic.com/whlchg.jpg

 

This doesnt sound good. There was a similar thread no so long ago which is here

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=242635&highlight=mybook

It seems as though the part of the drive that encrypts the data dies thus rendering the drive useless. You may be able to salvage the disk and put it in another external enclosure but all your data will be gone.

 

I think I might try seeing if it was recognized on another computer. Or maybe booting from a Linux CD and seeing if it is recognized. Puppy linux is small and can be run off CD or USB (you don't install it).

The "not initialized" isn't good but sometimes Windows is funny about externals when other OS see them OK.