WD My Passport won't show me all the data in the folders

[Guest]

Hello,

I recently bought a WD My Passport 1TB USB 3.0 external HD to use as a dump drive for Recuva recoveries, and I've done a few recoveries on USBs and SD memory cards, but the amount of data recovered that I can see doesn't match the drive when I right click on it's letter and view the properties. When I right click and view properties on each individual folder in it, plus the few things not in folders it totals 80-ish GB but when I click on "my computer" and then look at the data bar under the drive letter, it says I only have 390GB free out of 931GB.

Does anyone know why this is happening, or if maybe something is hidden in the drive that I can't see? I was also thinking this might have something to do with the differences between FAT, NTFS, and FAT32 (although I'm not sure what that means honestly). The WD My Passport is NTFS but the USBs and SD memory cards are a combo of FAT and FAT32. I'm doing this on a Windows 8 laptop in case that matters.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[popatim]

is your explorer set to view hidden and system files?
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=74220

 

[Guest]

is your explorer set to view hidden and system files?
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=74220

I used the Windows 7 guide and unchecked every box that was hiding anything, and also switched the circle from unshow hidden folders/files to show hidden folders and files, then I hit apply. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to click "reset folders" so I didn't, and I just checked a bunch of the folders in the drive for changes. I can see that there are some folders now that are showing that weren't there before, but it has barely added any data. I'm still in the 80GB range and it's still showing as 390GB free out of 931GB.

Any other ideas? I hope the drive isn't faulty, it's brand new.

 

[Another HD user]

Go to Run in the start up menu and enter:

chkdsk f: /r (where 'f' is, enter whatever the designated drive of the hard drive)

It'll take hours (my 2 TB took like 12hrs) but this worked for me, recovered all of my "invisible" files. Unhide and show hidden files didn't help me either.