WD passport showing no files

Hi, I’ve had this Western Digital 500GB External Hard drive since mid 2010 and have had no issues till now.

It has 200-300 gb of stuff, basically all my stuff on it. Yesterday I connected passport to my laptop then,my new kaspersky detected the virus and I removed it. I then went to access the wd external and when clicked on it opened and there were no files or folders apart from a folder called “RECYCLER” .But hard drive still seemed to have the data on it (It showed full in My Computer). How can I get back my files??

Try enabling Show Hidden Files and see if that shows anything.

Joe

Recycler is the Windows recycle bin.

Connect the drive to the PC where Kaspersky was running and flagged the virus issue. Then look in Kaspersky for if it has a Quarantine section, and see if your files are in there. If not look in the recycle bin on the desktop of that machine and see if they are there.

Depending on how you’ve got your AV set up, it may have either quarantined or deleted any of the files it saw as virus-infected. From your description it looks like maybe it saw all of the files on the drive as infected so took action (moving to Quarantine or deleted) all of them perhaps?

Once you can see what it did, you can maybe look at what can be recovered and from where, but be careful depending on what the original virus detection actually was for and how widespread the infection may be.