WD Passport registers as a drive on PC, but is unreadable

Hello, I am hoping someone can help me.

I was transferring data to my WD passport and the transfer failed saying their was an I/O error. I unplugged the drive and re-plugged it in. The light flashed as per normal and I could hear the drive spinning smoothly. The pc registered the drive (saying it is F-drive), but it will not fire up past that point (on three different computers).  If I try to right click and open the drive, the drive light starts flashing again, but nothing else happens. I have tried replacing the usb cable (twice without success).

I have all of my teaching for the past12 months on the drive and would hate to think it is un-retrievable.

Thankyou kindly for any assistance you can provide.

Jojo

I have been able to access my files by going to Disk Management, and right clicking open, on the drive. it appears everything is there, but  opening a PPT takes 10 minutes, and copying a file to the desktop  to back it up takes 25 minutes. Its only letting me do one at a time. I have 650gb worth of files to transfer/back up. Obviously the drive is damaged because the only way I could open it was via disk mgt. Advice

Jojo, your data is most likely still retrievable.

Did you drop it recently? Sounds like either a list of potential defected sectors on the drive is full and needs flushing, or one of the heads could be degrading. Both of the matters can slow your drive down to a crawl. The list is an easy fix, but head work on hard drives (specially passports) can get kinda expensive. With potential head failure I would recommend to stop using the drive since you are risking damaging the platters, and there is basically no point of return from there. Pm me if you’d like.