In September 2010, I purchased a WD 2TB My Book Essential External HDD to use as a back up for my small business and our entertainment media (movies, music, etc.) In January, after not using for approximately 1 1/2 months, I went connect all the cables and plug it into my Toshiba laptop running Vista Home 32bit. (BTW, this drive has been connected to another laptop running XP and one running Vista 64bit, all made by Toshiba, at one point in time or another and has worked fine all on 3 previously) Back to the story: I noticed that it was only available on my laptop intermittently (it would show up in My Computer one minute and then not be there the next). Figuring I had a loose connection, I began checking all the cables and noticed that the USB cable that plugs into the enclosure could not make a good connection. The actual "port" itself was loose inside the enclosure. After playing with it and trying to make a better connection, I think I actually made things worse and that "port" basically broke completely. Rather than sending it off to WD to either have them repair it or replace it (which, looking back would have been the smarter thing to do), my husband and I decided that we could try to fix it ourselves, thinking that it just needed to be resoldered back on. So we broke the case open and tried to fix it. Didn't work. After doing some research online, I discovered that we could simply buy an SATA adapter for the HDD and that would eliminate the need for the enclosure. So we went and bought one. (Most of the following has been done on the Vista 32bit machine). The drive was not listed as a drive in My Computer. However, it was listed in Disk Management but as an "uninitialized" disk. Right-clicking on it only resulted in it asking me if I wanted to initialize the disk. After more research, I decided to go ahead and initialize the disk because I couldn't find any other way of making the drive usable again. After the disk was initialized, any attempt to access the drive resulted in it asking me if I wanted for format the drive. The data on the drive was not critical to me and I knew there were ways to retrieve the data later if I so choose. I mainly wanted the drive to be accessible again. So, I formatted it. Now the drive is still not in My Computer and is only listed in Disk Management as "unreadable" and the space on it is "unallocated." As far as I can tell, the drive is physically fine. There are no clicking noises, nothing other than the sound of the drive spinning away just as it should. In the properties menu for the drive, it says that it is working just fine. EVERY piece of freeware I have tried to use to get to the root of the problem and fix it all recognize the drive and read the total size completely accurately. However, depending on the freeware and forum that you read, it is either a corrupt/lost partition (which BTW, TestDisk doesn't recognize there being any partition there), a corrupt MBR, or bad sectors or some combination of those. The most recent software I've thrown at it has been Acronis Disk Director which says the disk is offline but won't let me bring it online to do anything with it. So here are my questions:
1. What the heck is the ACTUAL root problem for this drive?
2. What can I do to fix a this drive that will actually work?
If the drive itself is toast, so be it. I've already resigned myself to the fact that I may have to purchase a new one in order to have a working external HDD again. However, if I can save myself some money by repairing/restoring this drive that is even better. If you have an actual solution, please lay it out for me step by step because I'm fairly new to this type of repair work.

You have to fix your original external case/Board or get exactly same one, otherwise take it to a pro.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

The OP wrote that "the data on the drive was not critical to me and I knew there were ways to retrieve the data later if I so choose".

Clearly she is not interested in recovering her data, therefore her original enclosure is not required, nor are the services of a "pro". In fact any third party enclosure will suffice, unless she particularly wants the original hardware encryption feature.

That said, after initialising and formatting her drive, it should have been business as usual.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Why didn't you just RMA this drive back to WD? I would hook the sata drive directly to your motherboard without the adapter and run some sort of scan on the drive to make sure its healthy. If Vista refuses to format it, try a bootcd like hirens.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.