External Hard drive error when formatting

[iBookG4user]

I have a portable 40GB external hard drive that I make bootable backup to weekly, but today I'm getting an error when I try to make the backup. When I originally plugged the hard drive in today it showed up fine and I could read and write files to it as always, but when I formatted it so I could make the bootable backup again I got an error. Disk utility said "Disk Erase failed with the error: Input/output error", I've tried with my other Mac and even my Ubuntu PC and gotten a similar message on all of them. Is my hard drive toast, even though it showed up fine before I tried to format it?

EDIT:
Just tried to format it via Terminal and got "Partitioning encountered error on disk disk2: Input/output error (5)". It's sounding more and more like a bad hard drive.

 

[ChrisA]

I have a portable 40GB external hard drive that I make bootable backup to weekly, but today I'm getting an error when I try to make the backup.

Take the drive out of the box and read the date the drive was built. Many have a 3 year warranty some have 5 years. You will have to deal with whoever made the drive, not the enclosure.

Now you can see why the "rule" is to have your data on three different media. Backup drives will fail, they all will. It is only a matter of when.

 

[iBookG4user]

Take the drive out of the box and read the date the drive was built. Many have a 3 year warranty some have 5 years. You will have to deal with whoever made the drive, not the enclosure.

Now you can see why the "rule" is to have your data on three different media. Backup drives will fail, they all will. It is only a matter of when.

I realize that I should have 3 different backups, and I do. I have another external hard drive, online backup, and DVD backups in addition to the other backup methods I use. This is just the 4th line of defense. I haven't lost any data, but the portable hard drive is made by Simpletech, which I've read has some of the worst tech support, hopefully they'll keep the 3 year warrantee that they provide and give me a replacement. But in the mean time guess I'll have to dig out one of my old hard drives and throw it in an enclosure for now.