My Passport External Drive Failure / Disk Utility failed

Hello,

I did some searching in this forum and others, but couldn't find an answer to my specific issue. I am having trouble with my external hard drive. It mounts and the files show up, but I get the spinning beach ball when I try to interact with the files and I am unable to unmount or write to the disk.

After I ran Verify Disk, it said the disk needed to be repaired. I tried to repair it, I get a "Disk Utility cannot unmount disk" error. I tried copying the disk to a new volume through Disk Utility, and that didn't work either. Time Machine also does not work. When I try to copy the files by simply dragging and dropping in Finder, I get an error telling me that either a file is in use, or ".DS_Store" is in use.

It's clear the disk is corrupted, but it still mounts to my computer so that's a good sign, I hope? What are my options here? How do I get the files off the disk? This is really driving me nuts. If there are options that don't involve spending lots of money, that would be most appreciated!

Thanks!