WD Essential External USB connection cuts on and off over and over

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
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Hi all,   My My book is the legacy one with the green circle. It plugs into the PC via USB.  I started getting read failures. Tested it on another PC and it behaved. Now the USB Connection continuously connections and disconnects and then eventually stops. Windows says that the USB device is not recognized sometimes and when testing on my other PC the same issues show up. I am not sure that this means the drives are bad. At the very least it means the USB connection  device inside the external drive has gone bad.  BTW, sometimes the connection stays on long enough to where I can see all my data on the drives. But othertimes I see nothing and sometimes I am told that the drive is loaded with bad sectors.  Data recovery services as a last resort, what are my options

Windows XP all the latest updates

Asus P5Q MB

3gig ram

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Come on. No responses? Just views? Surely I am not the only one who has had this happen.

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same issue i have any one

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Symptoms are going bad drive.

Is the drive spinning when you are having problem (listen to the drive for clicking noise; if clicking noise, then 100% drive is going bad or already bad).

Do have data you need to recover or just try to get drive working again?

If just drive working, then re-format to NTFS (do not use quick format) and try using after format.