WD did distribute a couple of bad runs of HDs thru really no fault of their own... the comp that manufactured them put in a wrong chip or something so they died fast... they DID and DO send you a new drive under their warranty without the hassle that all the others give you AND do it before you send them your old one.
Dell?! Explains alot right there.
We have probably 40 live HDs in our network and EVERY one of them is a WD... some dating to 1994. And not even a bad sector on one of them.
Odds are Meta, your data is still there. You just don't know how to get to it. If you did things the way you SAID you did, there is NO way the data got wiped. We sold and serviced more than 1000 computers a year for 4 years, so I have a bit of insight here. lol
You guys with large HDs need to learn to partition to smaller drives on those puppies and save yourself alot of headaches.