My Book Essential - cant see files

hi

this is dheeraj kulal. is been a year i’m using the WD My Book Essential(500GB).

its been a very bad experience using this device for last few weeks and now i’m paying for it.

I lost all the data from my book. Still i dont know why did that happen, and i’m sure that mistake was not from my side.

The scenario was like this,

  1. I  was using  Windows XP and 250GB HD. OS got crashed (frequently), so i decided to format the entire 250GB.

  2. I used Ubuntu Maverick CD to boot the system and then copied all data from the  system to MY Book(500GB).

  3. I already had Nearly 200GB of data in My book.  i copied nearly 230 GB of data from my system to  My Book.

     So the total data in My Book is nearly 430GB and  also checked whether files are properly copied or not.

  1. Later i format 250 GB of  the system and installed XP.

  2. Then i connected My Book to PC, it was shocking only few files are visible and the files i copied are missing. Then i checked the property of Book, it’s   showing 430GB is filled and only 30GB of space is available.

  3. tried few recovery softwares but no result

dnt know what to do. i dont want to lose any of the data. those files are entire collection of my life…

When you re-installed XP, did you change your folder view settings to that hidden files and protected system files are visible?  Because they default to being hidden, and that could easily be why a vast majority of your system files don’t show up for you, but why recovery software doesn’t think they’re “lost”.

thanks for your reply.

i checked most of the options. i just copied all the files to an external drive.