Files are in gibberish and unaccessable

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

What happened?

649×655 66.6 KB

The highlighted file names and drive name just appeared like this when I turned Win10 on yesterday. worked great for a week. Formatted exFAT on Win 10 AU. tried all usb hubs on 3 different win laptops and 1 mac. All dshow the same.
It is a my passport ultra 1 Tb just bought before Black Friday.
Any one Know what why how?

2

Hello,

Based on the information you have provided I believe this data has been corrupted or your drive has been infected with a virus. You can either run an antivirus to make sure your drive is not infected and/or try using a data recovery software.

3

I did run win defender and Malware-bytes none found and I only had copies of data from another external that is just fine.
what would cause the data to be corrupted?
I went ahead and reformatted to exfat32.
Do these drives not work as well in exFAT32?

4

We have found exfat to be more prone to corruption than other file systems, ntfs, hfs etc