Need help with bad external USB drive

I’ve got an external WD passport (I think that’s the version) HD that I use to copy quite a bit of “stuff” off of my old laptop. For some reason, when I plug it in this morning, the light on the drive flashes in a regular fashion (three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause, etc. - maybe that means SOS?) and does not stop. When I try to access the drive I get a message saying error, the disk structure is corrupted and unreadable. When I right click, Properties/Tools and then try checking for errors, I get a message that Windows can’t access the drive.

Is there any hope at all at getting some of the files on this drive?

Take it out of the UDB case and plug it into a dedicated sata port on the main board, see if you get a better result. That’s the first thing I always do on a external USB failure.

Before I tried that I tried chdsk /r from the command prompt. I had little hope since the light on the drive was flashing non stop and Windows was saying the drive was not accessible and trying to do a repair from the Properties menu was rebuffed.

However, miracle of miracle, a chkdsk /r from the command prompt worked! Now to make sure I back up the files on this backup drive! I really wish I had an upload speed faster than 5 Mbps so I could do practical file backup to a cloud solution (at 5 Mbps it takes 2 days to upload just 100G of data. :( )

Dude, it would take me two weeks to backup 100Gb of data to the cloud! :)

Yeah, I need something better than external USB drives.