External Hard Drive Cannot Be Formatted, Disconnects Continuously

I own a WD 1TB My Passport external hard drive with USB 3.0 that I am trying to use with a USB 2.0 port on my Windows 7 desktop computer. When plugged in, after about 40 seconds, it shows up in my Computer as "Local Disk (G: )" with no size or additional info. Every two minutes or so, the G: will disappear and a window saying "You need to format the disk in drive G: before you can use it" appears. The G: then reappears after another 5-15 seconds. After selecting the following "Format disk" option, when the G: eventually disappears again, the formatting options window appears and I can then choose my desired format settings and click "Start". After selecting "Start", nothing happens until the G: disappears once again and I receive another window saying "Windows can't format G" and to "Check to see that the disk and drive are connected properly, make sure that the disk is not read-only, and then try again."

Right-clicking the G: in Windows Explorer causes Windows Explorer to become unresponsive until the G: disappears, and no right-click menu appears. Double-clicking the G: similarly causes Windows Explorer to become unresponsive until the G: disappears, and another window pops up saying "G:/ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect."

Device Manager shows "WD My Passport 0730 USB Device" under "Disk drives" (even just after plugging in the hard drive, before G: appears for the first time), and right-clicking it immediately brings up the right-click menu, but clicking "Properties" while or just before G: is visible in my Computer causes Device Manager to become unresponsive until G: disappears. However, the Properties menu then loads properly and seems fully functional aside from the Volumes tab not displaying any data. Notably, the General tab states "This device is working properly."

Attempting to open Disk Management opens the Disk Management window, which simply displays "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service..." until G: disappears, when it seemingly displays everything properly, but with my external hard drive missing from the list of volumes. It does however, show up underneath the list of volumes as "Disk 1" "931.48 GB RAW" "Healthy (Primary Partition)". The moment G: disappears, it shows up in the list of volumes as "(G: )" with file system "RAW" and entirely empty (it shouldn't be empty) for a split second, then disappears.

Trying to run "chkdsk G:" or "chkdsk /f G:" from cmd (run as administrator) does nothing apparent until the G: disappears, when it says "The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives."


Though the external hard drive is not (or at least shouldn't be) empty, I do not care about any of its contents and would like to restore the hard drive to a usable state if possible. Is there anything else I should try to fix it?






Update: Tested the hard drive on two laptops, one running Vista through USB 2.0 and the other running Windows 7 through USB 3.0. With the hard drive plugged in, Windows Explorer crashes on both laptops, even when not trying to access the hard drive, which sometimes appears briefly as Local Disk in my Computer. Additionally, with the hard drive plugged in, both laptops run very slowly in general, with the USB 3.0 laptop even unable to load internet pages.