An Entire Folder is Missing From My External HDD

[Parth_2]

Hello!
This morning when I booted up my PC and connected an external HDD to it, I noticed an entire folder missing. I know its still there because the drive's properties say 11.8 GB free of 146 GB, but when I selected all the folders in the drive and checked out their properties, it only amounted to 55.1 GB.

I have tried everything given on this thread -> http://ccm.net/forum/affich-623304-hidden-files-on-my-hard-disk to no avail. I scanned the drive with Bit Defender however it returned nothing.

Tried Autorun Exterminator and Malwarebytes Antimalware. No joy.

When I try out the CMD attrib command, I get several access denied messages though...

My PC has Windows 10, and Bit Defender. I have tried running the HDD on a laptop with Windows 7, but can't see the folder on it either.

Will really appreciate any insights into how to resolve this issue.

Thank you!

 

[ktolo]

Was it marked as hidden by any chance?
To show hidden files and folders, go into view, folder and search options and untick the box that hides hidden files and folders.
If not, then it could be deleted.. in which case it resides now in one of those Recycle Bin container files.
I'm not to up on recovering these.. but if you read up on google about it, it should help.
There will almost certainly be instructions as well as freeware available to recover your data.
If you need to use data recovery, you must copy the files to a separate hard drive, never the one you are recovering from!!

 

[Parth_2]

Thanks for your response ktolo, unfortunately no. I have tried the view > show hidden files and folder & also tried unchecking the hide protected operating system files. I still cannot see the folder. By recycle bin container files, do you mean those folders that are given in the drive itself? If so, then perhaps you are referring to the folders mentioned in the screenshot in my post, the ones I can't seem to access. When I uncheck the hide protected operating system files under "view," I can see the $RECYCLE.BIN folder there, which has multiple folders within it (same ones shown in the dos prompt screenshot), however I cannot access them via windows either.

 

[ktolo]

In that case, I would suggest a boot disk, something like UBCD4 Windows or similar, with data recovery tools included.

You would need to burn this boot disk, boot with it, then try to recover or read the files that are missing to a different drive.