Problems with the WD passport

Question

I have a wd passport.  Every month or so; I backup the contents of all my PCs i.e. PC; tablet and laptop.  There is a lot of stuff I don't want to lose e.g. correspondence letters; software development learning projects etc.  My PC is problematic at the moment e.g. on Sunday; it showed the blue screen of death three times, but recovered each time.
Therefore I wanted to do an extra backup this week, however I am seeing errors when I plug in my mass storage device to any of my machines:

The parameter is incorrect
Sometimes it lets me browse files, but usually it will not allow me to open files.
Please reformat! Only started seeing this after I plugged the USB drive into my Mac to test.
error 0x800701E3

I am thinking about buying a USB 3 cable, however they are quite expensive.  Could this be a cable issue? Shall I just bite the bullet and buy a new mass storage device? Will a reformat work?

user1235186 · Answer

Could be a cable but let's check the disk first. Click on the Start button, type cmd, right-click the Command Prompt app, and choose Run as administrator to open an elevated Command Prompt.
Once at the command prompt type chkdsk "your drive letter": /f command and press Enter to find and fix disk errors. Replace "your drive letter" with the drive that the passport is.
If "your drive letter" is D then the command will be chkdsk D: /f
If you need to check bad sectors on the external hard drive, you can type chkdsk "your drive letter": /r command and press Enter. Replace "your drive letter" with the drive that the passport is.
If "your drive letter" is D then the command will be chkdsk D: /r
Hope this helps.
Also WD has a utility Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics or WD Drive Utilities for the passport that could help here is the link:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/product-detail/p/250#WD_downloads

Problems with the WD passport

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