So, yesterday when I plugged in my (WD My passport Gigabytes (P/N WDBACY5000ABK-01) USB 3.00) it showed how much was used from its data as usual in the file explorer. However, when I opened it, it only showed a couple of programs (.exe files) that were there on it. But it didn’t show the folders or any files inside them. The weird thing is that I am able to find any specific file I search using windows regular search bar. This never happened before. Please help.
P:S: I checked if the files were hidden, and I plugged it in in like different three laptops all running windows 7 and still the same problems.
Sorry I haven’t checked this post back in a while.
First, thank you very much for offering help. I have discovered one more thing. When I plugged it into a laptop running Ubuntu, everything was working fine (folders showing, no problem). However, when I re-plugged it in again to my windows machine, it still did not show the folders. (P:S. I just ran the diagnostics you mentioned in your comments, these were the results. However, the problem still exists !!!) And I cannot just format it because I’ll lose all my 500 GIGs of data !!! Please help
Since Linux is not an approved system there could be some type of corruption problem from using in both Windows and Linux. I would suggest coping the data off the drive while you can before trying anything. Something like TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk might fix the corruption issue. I have seen similar posts from people using the drive on different versions of Windows. I suspect it may be something related to the format properties like cluster size,