WD External HDD not showing up on desktop??

Hello all,
i woke up this morning and my western digital external HDD icon is not showing up on the desktop. I currently use this as a time machine and it has been working for about a year. This has happened before and just a simple re-plug of the usb does the trick, but i have been working on this for hours and for some reason it is not showing up. I have unplugged everything and re plugged them back in and nothing is working. i have checked the disk utility and the disk utility recognizes it. but i still dont know why it doesn't have an icon. i am running a repair disk on the external HDD now and it and it has been "repairing" for about 30 min now. i have tried to backup but it is not working either.
has this happened to anyone before? any answers?

 

nope, just restarted my laptop and it still didnt show up.