External Hard Drive Problems cannot access

[partington]

I'm not sure if this is a related problem or not, and not directly applicable to the OP, because I have a Mac. Nevertheless it is a possibility that it's related.

As mentioned above WD external hard drives are loaded up with software and a "virtual CD" which appears on the desktop whenever you plug in the disk. There is a procedure and a special app that will stop this from happening,and stop loading this (unwanted by me) crap, but it's a pain.

I never used the software which is designed to auto back up your files by assigning them to folders and then comparing previous files and auto updating any new files each time you plug in the drive. I never wanted to use this clunky stuff so never activated the software, and just backed up (stored, really) files how I wanted by drag and drop.

After more than 3 years, filling the disk almost to capacity with mostly downloaded movies and TV, one day I plugged it in, and to this day I don't know how, the backup software app activated. It began to format the drive into folders for documents , pictures and so on, and all my video downloads became "unseeable" by the computer. I could see the WD disk, click on it, and see the folders and backup format the software had assigned but all folders were empty. I know for sure the files were all still there because the formatting took about a minute, so obviously nothing was deleted, everything was merely re-indexed or re-formatted and so the files were now invisible.

Luckily I had bought a new external drive a few weeks before- this time just a simple internal hard drive that I put in a SATA external mount box - and as it was twice the capacity of the WD drive, and partly as a whim, to test it, I had backed up the whole WD drive on it already, so I didn't lose anything.

I didn't put any effort into trying to recover the "lost" files from the WD disk, but spent a long time online finding out how to delete the software/virtual CD from the WD disk before I started using it again... however if the OP's drive has just become "re-indexed" or reformatted, someone with more knowledge than me may be able to suggest a recovery method.

Edited June 12, 2015 by partington