What is "This location cannot be displayed." telling me with regard to portable USB drive?

I have a Western Digital MY Passport Ultra 2GB drive. I plugged it in and got a popup dialog that said:

This location could not be displayed. Sorry, could not display all the contents of "36D2920FD292D410": Error when getting information for file 'media/user/36D2920FD292D410/bin': Input/output error

But this error went away after just repeatedly clicking the drive icon in the Files application and re-inserting the USB cable a time or two. I have no idea what changed things. I was then able to copy my home directory to the drive. But it took a long time and when I came back to it in the morning the computer had shut down for some reason.

Now I get the error message again and it isn't going away. How do I handle this error message?

EDIT: I tried this drive in my Windows 10 computer and it also gives an error saying that a file or directory is unreadable. I am going to reformat it in Windows.