My Passport Thrashing

i have a 1TB Passport connected to the usb port on my Asus RT-N56U router, which i use for backup with Macrium Reflect for the three Win7 computers connected to my home network. Most of the time this works fine.

Frequently the passport starts doing something for no apparent reason, the activity light stays on continuously and the drive spins for several hours. Using Win Explorer to try to access the drive says it is busy with a mount/dismount operation. If i let it run, sometimes it will stop and become accessible. Sometimes in the middle of an operation (Logitek Sqeezebox Server library scan) it will become inaccessible.

If i take the drive off the router and connect it to one of the computers directly, this continuous spinning still happens, but i can open the files on it. I do not have SmartWare installed on any of the computers.

What's going on and how do i stop it?

 

Please give the exact brand name and model number of the (I assume external 'passport') drive.

 

Western Digital My Passport, p/n WDBACX0010BBK-00, S/N WXD1A2127187.

 

Have you run any tests on the external drive itself? You can do that from within Windows itself and/or you can use a freeware software program to give it a full test for integrity.

 

western digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows quick check detects no problems. i did not run a full check to look for bad sectors. i also ran chkdsk /f, which found no errors.

 

I had similar issues and it turned out that the controller circuit on the hard drive's PC board was going bad. I had to replace the drive. Fortunately, I was able to get everything off of it first.

 

Recommending on backing up all your info.I have the same thing so far have not had an issue.You can get a new one at walmart for like 65$ dollars for a 1 tb external drive.