I purchased my 2TB WD Passport Ultra last month and transferred 50GB of files to the drive which was fine. Today I attempted to create a recovery start up for my Windows 10 Operation System. This failed to work. When I looked at my external hard drive it showed that there was nothing on it and it only had 31.9GB of free space. The items I saved to it and the pre-installed stuff weren’t showing. On my laptop the drive had also changed from Passport Ultra to Local Disc (G).
Can you please tell me how I can recover the items I had stored on it and how I can recover the drive.
Regards, Mark
Windows has almost certainly repartitioned and reformatted your drive.
You may have luck with a partition recovery tool, but I would honestly be amazed and would expect your data to be lost. The recovery startup stuff in Windows is designed to be done with a dedicated USB key drive not a drive like an ultra. Normally it also warns you what is going to do to the drive, as it is quite drastic.
Welcome to the WD Community, Mark!
I’d recommend you check how the WD My Passport appears in Disk Management. Moreover, sharing some screenshots would be very helpful. 
Have you tried un-hiding the files and folders on the external HDD?
If you have access to another Windows OS computer/laptop, I’d suggest you try plugging the external hard drive there to see how it will get recognized. Another thing that might help you see the data is changing the drive letter of the WD My Passport through Disk Management.
As soon as you gain access to the files on the drive, make sure you back them up!
I’d also run the Quick and Extended tests from the Data LifeGuard Diagnostics tool just to check up on the health and S.M.A.R.T. status.
Keep us posted with the troubleshooting!
SuperSoph_WD
