External USB Drive Will Not Mount

Recently my external Western Digital USB drive will not mount. The unmounted disk icon shows up on the desktop when I plug in the USB drive and then when I try to mount via the GUI (right click mouse and choose "mount") it says operation failed. I am also unable to mount via command line - I get a message that says the partition is busy or already mounted. This is a production web server (SLES10-SP3) that has been running for six years with the same Western Digital USB external drive ( used to back up my web root). I am not sure if this is a sign of the external drive on its last leg or not. I was thinking of deleting the lines referencing the Western Digital external drive in /etc/fstab and then rebooting. Is that okay to do? Thanks. Here is my /etc/fstab Code: /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD1600YS-18_WD-WCAP01651022-part2 /                    reiserfs  acl,user_xattr        1 1 /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD1600YS-18_WD-WCAP01651022-part1 swap                swap      defaults              0 0 proc                /proc                proc      defaults              0 0 sysfs                /sys                sysfs      noauto                0 0 debugfs              /sys/kernel/debug    debugfs    noauto                0 0 usbfs                /proc/bus/usb        usbfs      noauto                0 0 devpts              /dev/pts            devpts    mode=0620,gid=5      0 0

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