Unresponsive External HD - Virus?

Hello,

I have done a pretty deep preliminiary search of the web to solve this problem and can't seem to find my exact situation - any help is GREATLY appreciated.​
My WD external hard drive has been functional for two years and all of a sudden stopped appearing in the My Computer window (system is Windows 7, 32bit). When I go to disk management, I cannot re-assign a drive letter or access the disk at all as it seems to not be initialized. According to what I have read, there is a 90% chance that I have a virus. I also tried to plug the drive into my brother's MacBook which runs Windows XP on a partition. On his computer, the drive was not even recognied by the disk management utility.

I would therefore like to do a scan of the external HD somehow to determine if I do have a virus and if there is any way that I can cleanse it rather than wiping the external HD clean. I am afraid that my secondary backup of photos and documents is not totally up to date and I will lose a lot if I have to wipe clean. If all this fails, I may go to a data recovery specialist and pay $$$ to recover the files.

Any ideas?

Thanks​
 
Having a similar issue on a NEW hard-drive, there's a couple of suggestions I've found (which I'm posting) on my write up.
 
When I go to disk management, I cannot re-assign a drive letter or access the disk at all as it seems to not be initialized. According to what I have read, there is a 90% chance that I have a virus.
MAYBE
I also tried to plug the drive into my brother's MacBook which runs Windows XP on a partition. On his computer, the drive was not even recognied by the disk management utility.
That settles it - - not a virus but a bad partition table.
You need to repair the partition and attempt to avoid any reformatting as that's the kiss of death for any data on it.
 
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