Time Machine "lunched" my portable hard drive

After deciding to upgrade from Lion to Mav's, it was obvious that I would do the right thing - first time for everything - and back-up my MBP (late 2011 / Lion 10.7.5) The portable hard drive is a Hitachi HTS54 (1616J9AT00 Media) 160 GB - not exactly new I agree - using FAT 32 to use on PC and MAC OS and connected via USB.

So I copied the data from the portable. Opened TMac it showed the HD, asked if it could erase the drive etc - I said yes.

TMac churned away for sometime (maybe 20 mins) then said - not exactly sure - that the disk could not be partitioned.

I went into Disk Utility (DU) and it didn't allow any First Aid or the options - neither verify or repair.

So I went to Erase. Tried OS Extended and nothing, tried FAT 32 with the same outcome.
The error message says "Unable to write to the last block of the device".

Also tried Partition with both formats and the same error message at the end of it.

I need to get the portable HDD running, the lost information is not the issue. I want to back-up the MBP before the upgrade.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Blaz

Get a new HDD. It's dead, and quite frankly was likely already failing before you tried to reformat it. The reformat process just forced the issue.

EDIT: I suppose there is a slim chance that the USB cable is faulty. You could always try replacing that first.