my drive is used under time machine on my mac. today it gave me an error message saying it had not been backed up in 366 days when i think it has been up until the message. check in the finder and find recent backups. i tried to format and re-backup but the format failed as well is time machine wrong or is the drive dead???? rebooted now my macbook does not even see it

When connected direct to my iMac's firewire the harddrive refuses to wake from sleep- has to be power cycled to wake up, connected via USB works fine. Once I connected it to another external firewire drive the problem also resolved.