I have a Western Digital hard drive that's about 4 or 5 years old. It's 500 GB, USB. I use it to backup my Mac every so often. I had it partitioned: 1 side for full backups, and the other side for general storage of music, installers, etc.

I decided to get rid of the partition today and dump all the data. So I opened disk utility, and hit 'erase'. It started thinking and then disk utility crashed. After the crash, the hard drive won't mount, however disk utility still sees the drive, but not the individual volume within.

I tried booting up Disk Warrior and no luck there either. It has the drive as an "unknown drive". When I hit rebuild, it goes through all it steps and then stops cause of this error:

The drive "unknown" is severely damaged and DiskWarrior is unable to determine its case sensitivity

What can I do at this point? There isn't any physical damage to the drive. Never been dropped or anything.