MyPassport: started to ask me to format it. What should I do?

I’ve been using My Passport Essential 500G bought 2 months ago, and one day (about a week ago) it started to ask me to format. It says Drive M: needs to be formatted to be used. (My windows Vista is in Korean so I assume a capture will not work…)

on My Computer, Drive G: (WD virtual CD) and M: (main partition) do appear, but both appears to be empty, and I do not see the file system for M:.

Tried WD Data LifeGuard Diagnosis, and BOTH Quick and Extended Test failed.

Extended Test says that it has too many bad sectors.

Quick Test says that Quick Test did not complete, Status Code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test).

WD Korea told me -over a phone call-  that they CANNOT do anything with this, just told me to use commercial software/service to restore data. (though I contacted them before I tried LifeGuard Diagnosis. they didn’t even mention about the existence of this software!!!) what the…

Is there any way I can restore data (~100G musics, videos and pictures, along with document backups!!!) from the HDD and reuse it?

(Not sure if it’s a wise decision to reuse it though… can bad sectors be treated perfectly?)

Thanks in advance for your advices and suggestions.

Since there’s been no replies, maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en