Hi, This drive has really screwed up. It still tells me that I have 698GB on the drive. When I click on it their was two sets of folders. One that I put all the preloaded stuff in, like the autorun setup and the tools folders. The other with my stuff. That’s still all there. When I click on the folder with all my stuff, their is 11 folders where I’ve organized my data into. That is still there. The problem is when I click on any one of the folders there isn’t as many files as they should be and the files aren’t right. The file names have mostly gibberish and weird symbols in them. Here and there part of a real file name is mixed in. One folder has about 20 intact files in them mixed in with the gibberish files. I don’t know if this coincidence or not but this all happened after I pulled about 5GB, from the folder that has some of the intact files in it, to another drive. I hope that someone here can help me recover this data. Thanks for reading and your help.
Did you install the Smartware backup it’s ■■■■? Some of the disk loss is a virtual CD that you cannot delete. Welcome to the WD mess. I’ll try and post more later.
Joe
No I didn’t run the setup or install any of the programs that came with it. I just plugged and played it. At this point I have no idea what caused this, if the data can be recovered or the drive fixed. Any help you or anyone else can give me is much appreciated. Thanks for the reply.
As a heads up, you should always copy and paste on to another drive until you know for sure that your data is okay. I always leave things for a few days. On top of that, if your data is really important to you, you should always have a backup. That means having the data in at least two different locations. Moving your data to an external drive is not backing it up. It’s just moving it.
Now, since I’m not sure how you moved your data, it looks like it could be corrupted. That may have happened if you pulled the USB or power supply cable after backing up the data, without safely removing the drive. Or, if you have a bad USB port, or cable, that will corrupt it also. You can try running Windows Error Check on the drive and see if it will restore the data. Otherwise, you will have to try some other kind of data recovery software. Once you’ve done what you can to recover the software, you will need to move the data off the drive and repartition and format the drive - just in case the partition or file structure is still damaged.
