1tb passport this folder is empty

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

When I plug my passport 1tb into my laptop or pc vista and xp it shows up fine and shows I have 705gb of free space on it in properties. But when I try to access it by dbl clicking or explore it just says “This Folder Is Empty” and I can’t read any of the files. I can use a recovery program and see them. Why is it doing this and how do I fix it without having to run a recovery program ? Any help is appreciated.

I did run the WD diag program and it comes up with no problems

2

I found out by accident that the file attributes were changed to read only and hidden. Don’t know how that happened but I now have access

3

The folder structure probably got corrupted by not safely removing the drive.