Not that I would ever have on of these drives… but someone has a problem and I thought that the brain trust here my have a tried and true (simple & straightforward / ha-ha) data recovery approach for this drive…
I have a 2TB external Western Digital Western Digital My Passport Ultra that I've used for Time Machine backups among other things for several years. It also has the most up-to-date version of my music library.
The other night I connected it to my MacBook and it was working fine. I left it connected and put the computer to sleep while I did some other things, it when I went back to it, the drive showed on the desktop, but all that I got when I clicked on it was a "loading" message. It wouldn't eject so I finally used Force Eject. But remounting only resulted in more of the same, even after a restart, and using a different USB cable.