Can't open my Western Digital external hard drive

I have been hopping around the web following links and trying to find a solution to my problem.  In short I have a dell E520 desktop running a 32 bit vista  home premium OS.  we moved and the computer was set-up without the 500G western digital my book external drive.  So I pluged it in and I have had nothing but trouble to include a variety of  problems an error message stating there was a hardware with an unknown driver, unable to locate a driver, unable to update driver.  Now the device is recognized under device manager with a driver.  However the my book does not appear in my computer and I can't access any of our files. 

A  few threads talked about pointing the device to the C:\Windows\winsxs to find the driver-didn't help

II am waiting to uncorrupt the INFCACHE.1 because it seems to me that there is a driver and it seems to be working so would this really help?  I hope there maybe another solution out there.

Western digital was of little helpunless I want to drop some coin for their efforts, but they did tell the warranty had expired-great!

Any help would be awesome.

Thanks,

JGP