External Hard Drive Is Showing No Files In Folders?
Feb 2, 2010
I am using a brand-new Dell Inspiron One model with a Lacie-model external hard-drive, on Windows 7. All of a sudden, when I click to view my folders, they are completely empty. When clicking on the My Computer option, my hard drive is there, showing 76 GB free out of a total of 232 GB, but everything appears to be gone. When I click on those files, I receive the error stating I am afraid to re-start or unplug my hard drive.
I just got a new Packard bell go external hard drive which I used for a couple of days with no problem. btw it has never fell or had any physical damage. I plugged it one day into the PC and it couldn 't be detected in my computer. it shows up in devices and printers and also in disk management. I read on some forums to try and initialize it but it gives me an error saying cyclic redundancy check. I 've tried everything but still not working. this is a new hard drive which has never fell and no physical damage. and please don' t tell me to return it cos it was bought in another country. the only option right now is to fix it?
I have a problem My 3TB Western Digital Hard Drive is not showing up on any PC I connect it to. The light on the drive itself is on, but no where on the PC does it register.
I am pretty sure the disks aren't spinning either, but that is probably because the computer isn't picking it up, and no vice-versa.
So I recently purchased and installed a new hard drive in my PS3. To do that I had to reformat my Western Digital 250 GB hard drive to FAT32 format. Ok, so that's all well and good but I then decided to take my PS3, 60 GB HD (the brand escapes me, but it's a big manufacturer of hard drives) and put it in an external hard drive enclosure. I figured that it's a perfectly good hard drive so there was no sense wasting it. Anyway, as technologically impaired as I might sound after this (which I'm really not) I feel compelled to divulge that I actually did not know that two external hard drives shouldn't be too close to each other. As soon as I put one on top of the other, the 60 GB hard drive beeped and a message popped up saying it needed reformatting. So after reformatting everything a second time, I plugged in the hard drives and the 60 GB one showed up but my 250 GB one did not.
It's showing up everywhere else (disk management, device manager) but not in My Computer. So I have no access to it at all. Also, I did not need to reformat the 250 GB HD since my computer gave me no message indicating that I should. I'd rather only use reformatting as an absolute last resort since it takes HOURS but if it's necessary that I'll have to break down. Throw other options at me first though
few folders in my external hard drive are missing. I am running a scan and hopefully it'll fix, but it takes so long to scan the hard drive as it's a 3 TB hard drive.
I have a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 Ultimate on my PC and there are times that when I reboot my computer or turn it on from an off state I get the Autoplay prompt for my External HDD. This occurrence is totally random and it doesn't happen sometimes. It just gets annoying that when you boot up you see that prompt and you have to close it every now and then.I have an Asus P8Z68-V motherboard.
I'm having a problem to convert my external hard rive to ntfs its showing raw it don't pickup the volume label. I whet into prompt also and it doesn't seem to see the hard drive. I tried so many stuff already.
I decided to move of my music files onto one external hard drive. The drive (FAT32) has a capacity of 372 Gb and properties show 58.9 Gb has been used. However I can only see 5Gb of files - the others are taking up the disk space but I just can't see them. I've tried searching, refreshing, etc. how I can gain access to the files?
I have a 500gb seagate external hard drive, and already used 240gb space. It worked fine until yesterday suddenly i could not access the files at all. I checked disk management, and it showed that my external drive became RAW drive. I tried to do chkdsk that I learned from one of the forum, and then it somehow has fixed the RAW drive back to FAT32. However I still cannot see any of my files. I opened command prompt, and typed in dir /a and it said 0 files 0 bytes, 4 DIR 288,714, 293, 248 bytes free. How can I bring my files back?? I don't want to lose my files.
I just spent like 18 hours copying 600K files, 1.33 TB, from a USB 2.0 ext. drive to a 1.36 TB USB 3.0 partition, but at the very end I got a handful of prompts to replace folders that already existed in the newly created folder, asked me to merge the original folder with the one just copied on the destination drive, eventually asking for permission to replace thousands of items and that's what it's doing now. I don't know what's going on. It appears that all files are there in both folders on each drive (with the exception of half a dozen that wouldn't copy due to long filenames).
Nearest I can guess is it is writing DOS names in addition to Windows names so the computer is going to spend more than a dozen more hours doing that. Windows Explorer copy wrongly offers to merge folders Windows Explorer copy wrongly offers to merge folders. The folder being copied that is being merged is called Drive(D), probably from a backup of Win 98SE being restored onto a Win XP machine, so it may resemble a system folder to Windows 7.
I have 465gb of files and folders on a 500Gb hard drive that needs to be cut/pasted higher in the folder hierarchy.
Here's a visual:
The reason this happened is my HD broke down and I had to send it to a company (ChronoDisk) to extract the information to another HD. This is how they sent it.
I need to move those files because the path used by many programs/files are broken. Is it possible to do this without actually cut/pasting? My guess is it might crash half way or simply not work at all because there is not enough empty space to make a cut.
Wondering if there should be a STICKY, GROUPS or THREADS for TIPS and TRICKS? in this forum -combined perhaps with a wish list that we can send to MSFT every month
Anyway, one thing I really like about OS X is the ability to drag a folder from desktop to computer, then the window auto opens, displaying root, then you can drag over another folder (which opens to display sub root) and so on until you find the place where you want to dump the folder.
Is there a way to do this in Win 7 (or Vista)?
EDIT: NEW = it will allow you to drag a folder from desktop to start button than into my documents folder. Not bad but better than nothing. All we need now is for my documents to open and have it display sub folders and/or the ability to drag anywhere. Advice?
I consider myself relatively computer savvy, and I even talked to my IT-professional soon-to-be brother-in-law... but now I turn to you, BleepingComputer. I really need help here.Short Version:I keep all of my personal files on an external hard drive. That 1TB hard drive was getting full, so I bought a new 2.5TB hard drive. I start working from the files on the new drive. After about 30 seconds or so, folders just show as 0 bytes and "There are no files in this folder". The hard drive works on other computers (HP laptop) but not my Dell desktop. This has happened (sort of) with three different, brand new external hard drives. What would cause this?Super Long VersionI'm running a Dell Precision T5400 workstation with Windows 7 64Bit Home Premium. I keep two 1TB redundant drives at all times, synced monthly via SyncToy. The 1TB drives were filling up so I bought two 2TB Seagate external drives. And then this string of events happened:
1) Copied all of the data from the 1TB to a 2TB SEAGATE drive. 2) SyncToy'ed them to ensure that all of the data was definitely there. 3) Retired the old 1TB drive. 4) Began to duplicate the 2TB drive to the other 2TB drive. 5) In the middle of copying, I received the error, (something like) "Cannot copy files as the source file no longer exists". 6) Checked Disk Manager, and the 2TB drive shows up as RAW format now?! It was originally NTFS. Search Seagate forums and you'll find that this is a common problem. 7) Restart. Same problem. The other 2TB SEAGATE drive now has "USB device not recognized" errors. 8) Try restarting, copying over and over. Same results. 9) Plug both drives into my work laptop (Mac Bootcamp Windows 7 64bit). Both show up as "Drive needs to be formatted to proceed". 10) I format both of them and perform check disks on my Mac Laptop. 11) They're fine. Then I plug them into my Dell Desktop. 12) I run SeaTools on them. One has an error and can be RMA'd. The other is "USB device not recognized".I RMA them both and mail them in.At this point, I hate Seagate because they seemingly sold me two faulty 2TB drives. 13) I buy two new 2.5TB Western Digital Hard drives.(expensive. btw). 14) I un-retire my old 1TB drive and plug it into my Mac Bootcamp laptop. Disk has errors. Run the recovery tool. All seems well. 15) I copy my 1TB to one of the 2.5TB WD drives on my HP laptop (it's super old, and I had to go to work with my Mac) 16) I plug in the new 2.5TB drive to the Dell Desktop, and some of the folders show up empty?!? 17) Plug that drive back into the old HP Laptop all of the files show up.At this point, I'm super confused. There's clearly something wrong with my desktop? 18) I perform the following while checking the disk in between each new trial: system restore, uninstall USB drivers/host controllers, start in safe mode. Nothing works. Same problem. Folders show as empty. 19) Plug the drive back into the HP laptop. Files are there. 20) Re-install BIOS on the desktop. Folders show as empty. 21) Run Malwarebytes, HiJackThis... nothing out of the ordinary. 22) The computer doesn't fully start up when the 2.5TB WD drive is plugged in. 23) I run startup recovery. It spits out a bunch of errors. Fixes some, some not. 24) Folders show as empty.
I am trying to defragment my external hard drive, a Western Digital passport 500gb. A lot of space is being taken up by these unmovable files and I want to consolidate the free space.
The recycle bin is empty, I have deleted the WD folder, I have deleted the "system volume information" by booting into Ubuntu live. I don't know why there was a system volume information anyway, system restore is not on for this drive.
I have "show hidden files and folders" and "show operating system files" selected and cannot see anything other than the empty recycle bin (and of course all the data on there, the data is back ups of photo's, movies, etc.) ....so what is there left that is "unmovable"? I can't see anything at all that would be considered a system file.
I have a external hard drive with lots of movies on, now it takes explorer ages to display them all, I have set view to just details as I thought it would speed up the displaying of them. Is there any way to make them display faster? I have K-Lite codec pack installed if that's any help.
I have an external hard drive, I copied onto the computer but the files are confusing. There are 279 files and files within files. How do I get them back to their original format for example word, excel, etc.
I have a Seagate 1.5 TB Free Agent External Hard Drive . I have a folder with approx500 GB in this H.D. This folder have some other 3 -400 folders . Sudenly , when I open the H.D. I cannot see this folder ; when I check the H.D.'s properties the folders / files are in the H.D.
I have an old hard drive with a ton of pictures and other irreplaceable files on it from a computer I had few years back. In case it makes any difference, the computer that hard drive originally was in ran Windows XP Pro.I recently got a new computer, with Windows 7 and had the hard drive put into this new computer, along with the hard drive that came in the computer.I can get to the drive itself, but when I try to access folders or files, either access is denied or folders which should contain more folders, are empty. I have tried changing the permission and ownership options on the drive, but no luck.
I keep a lot of confidential information on both my C: and an external hard drive. Is there a way for me to password protect the folders and files on these drives?
i took out the hard drive from my laptop that had a BSOD and can't boot. I boutght an enclosure n plugged it using usb to another laptop so i can get my files, but when i click on the disk a window pops up saying disk is not formatted..i dont want to lose my files si i downloaded tesdisk. When i choose "Analyse" it seems that it finds four partitions, but above each one there's a warning "Incorrect number of heads/cylinders 255 (NFTS) ! =240 (HD) or Bad sector head and Bad Ending Head and Bad Starting head..I dont know what to do next.
I am trying to transfer files on my external hard drive (Toshiba Canvio - Windows XP) to my new computer (Windows 7), but when I click on the file located on the external hard drive, I get the following messsage: "please select a valid job". How can I transfer all of the old files on my external drive to my new computer?
I just figured out that I can't delete files from my external hard drive. It's WD Elements 320GB. Only thing I did before this occured is that I converted file system from FAT32 to NTFS via command in cmd prompt, but I'm not sure if that showed up after that. So, I don't have "delete" or "rename" commands on right click. Backup of all files is a no go since I don't have so much free space atm. I use my user account which is also admin account.
Just recently i had to reformat my computer, i had some pretty personal documents where i placed in a password protected folder. I forgot exactly how i password protected it but to access the file i would click on a file called locker, and a black screen would open up, i would type in the password push enter and the file would appear, then to lock it i just open locker again and push "y".
I had to reformat my computer so copied all the contents that was inside the folder (and not the locker) onto a hard drive and reformmated my computer, however, now i cannot access these files. I can see them but they all say access denied due to permission rights.
I've followed all the security changes ive found and made myself the owner, set security settings to full control etc however, still cannot access these files. They are really important and was wondering if there was a way i can access them again or is there any programs that can unlock them? Ive tried all the programs similar to |unlocker"
I have a Titan 500 GB portable hard drive, the computer will after a longer than normal time recognize the PHD, the list of files will open up. But when I try to open the file, I get a non responsive message, then it just freezes.
I purchased a Silicon Power Rugged Armor A80 external hard drive to back up my computer & I can't get it to work. When I try to back up MY Documents, it scans the files, then the window says "wrong input" & "access denied".I have been trying to get help from Silicon Power customer service, but they haven't been able to shed any light on my problem. I'm running Windows 7 Professional & have Norton Internet Security. Could there be some kind of incompatibility with my OS or Norton that's preventing access to the files?
Recently my laptop crashed beyond repair, and has had to be rebuilt. It now operates on Windows 7.Luckily I had backed up some important files onto a portable external Lacie Hardrive. I now need to return some of the files back to the laptop so that I can use them..but I can't seem to find a way to do it!! I suppose I'm just being 'thick'..but can anyone tell me how to do it.
