cannot see files on harddrive

[Springfield66]

My desktop packed up and I have bought a 'Cable Matters' Sata Drive Docking Station. It seems to open fine on my laptop which is using windows 10 and I have the drive letter as 'H' and the files letters as 'I'. The problem is although I can see my name on the disk I cannot open any of the files including photos, everything. To ensure it is working properly, I opened a word file, copied it as a test file to the harddrive in the docking station and it is visible and I can open it. Any ideas what I am doing wrong? I am dead meat if I cannot find the photos?

 

[tman1]

Did you copy files and folders over to it or just make shortcuts on the drive?

 

[Springfield66]

Sorry I should have stated, I removed the hard drive from my defunct desktop, inserted into the Docking Station and plugged it, via usb into the laptop. I can open the hard drive from the docking station on the laptop. I open the drive letter (H) and this shows another drive letter (I) I then clcik on this having tried both H and I and see a number which is the number of my defunct desktop (i.e. OWNER 24356) When I try to open it further to recover my files. nothing.

 

[wpgwpg]

Maybe the folders and files on that drive are marked hidden for some reason. Did you change the settings to show hidden files? Also if you used something like your Pictures folder, you'd find that as a subfolder of the Users folder so the path would be something like x:\users\your_id\Pictures.

Good luck.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Springfield66,

That is unpleasant. 🙁

You can try several things.
- You can give the Ubuntu Live CD approach a try. Just boot up from a flash drive or a CD and see if you will be able to access the files on the drive: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode
- You can use some data recovery tool: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
- Attach the HDD internally and see if this will change something.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD