External Hard Drive Problem

Hello, I've had a problem with my external hard drive. Today i was backing up my friends hard drive and i was copying files to mine and out of no where it stopped copying and i unplugged it and plugged my hard drive back in and it said that the file or directory was currupted and unreadable, and it said i needed to format it. This is the second time this has happened to me. And the second hard drive. My first hard drive it happened and i lost my data and had to format, so i thought the drive was messed up and i bought a new one. Now around 1 month later the same thing happened on the new hard drive.

I am currently running a getdataback program on it to see if i can recover anything before i format it. I use windows vista and i never had a problem like this when i had windows xp. Thanks for your opinion