Problems with the WD passport

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:

1. The parameter is incorrect
2. Sometimes it lets me browse files, but usually it will not allow me to open files.
3. Please reformat! Only started seeing this after I plugged the USB drive into my Mac to test.
4. 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?

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