EHD Fails to Repair/Unmount

I have a Western Digital MyPassport 1TB external hard drive, that’s less than 1 year old. I’m using a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.6.7.

Today, my time machine backups started failing on the device, and eventually I lost access to backups (as well as my music and photos on another partition).

When I attempt to run a Disk Utility repair, this occurs:

Verify and Repair volume “Backup”

Error: Could not unmount disk

Verify and Repair volume “Storage”

Error: Could not unmount disk

If I try to unmount from Finder, I receive this message:

The disk “Storage” wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it.

To eject the disk immediately, click the Force Eject button.

I have made sure no files are in use, yet I still receive this message when I never have before.

Also, if I attempt to run another repair through Disk Utility once the partitions are unmounted, I see this:

Verify and Repair volume “disk1s1”

Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required. Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

Verify and Repair volume “disk1s2”

Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required. Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

I am at a loss for what to do here, and any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thank you!

either there are some bad sectors on the drive, or there is some data corruption going on.  either way I would backup the data and then repartition and format the drive.  wd has a diagnostic utility that will physically check the drive for smart function and bad sectors, but you have to run it on a windows computer, because the utility is only for pc’s.