Files Dissapeared Some Hard Drive But Still Taking Space?

My operating system: Windows 7 home premium SP1 64 bit

I kind of avoided doing too much right now so things won't get erased.

Basically i turned on my desktop and out of the blue it says there is something wrong with one of my hard drives.

I never got indication of a faulty drive before but at this point i will advise any user reading this : stay the hell away from western digital blue drives...

This is not the 1st time this has happened to me with this line series so its my fault to still trust this series ! The blue hard drives were ok prior to the whole green drives converting to blue. Now the blue drives are green disguised as blue drives ( which were the lowest quality of the consumer line for WD).

Anyways did the normal virus, malware scans everything came out clean . Then i ran the windows checkdsk application and it failed to fix anything until i ran it through the command prompt at which point it fixed the drive but the files are not there.

command i used were chkdsk /f e: and chkdsk /r e:

I can see my hard drive in my computer as ''healthy'' and formatted as NTFS, i even see '' 1.7 TB free of 3.63 TB'' . It shows there is something in the hard drive but when i select it , its just completely empty.

Prior to this i kept getting a '' cannot access hard drive'' error and it just showed the hardrive as NTFS but no space at all. I went into properties changed permissions and allowed full control and this is how i now see that there is ''something'' in there but nothing i can physically see.

I cannot be the only one having poor luck with western digital blue drives... i swear that these POS drives ALL start having issues around the 1 year mark.

Though its not all bad for me right now because i actually learned my lesson last time and now i backed up about 85% of what was in the drive but failed to back up the last 2 months in which case i may end up losing 10-15% data

 

I have either experienced or had close friends tell me horror stories about every major HDD manufacturer. I had a WD Black notebook drive two years ago that was developing errors and sent it back under warranty. Three tries; each "recertified" drive I received as a replacement died within 15 minutes of starting WD's own Data Lifeguard long DST! At least a dozen calls and emails were useless in trying to solve the issue.

On the bright side, kudos to Samsung. I have an EVO 850 that was having trouble with a firmware upgrade. They sent me a PREPAID two-day air shipping label, fixed the issue and sent it back within 4 days. The next week, they even called me to be sure I was totally happy with the service I received. As of this, even if they're a few bucks higher, I'll always turn to Samsung for Solid State Drives.

 

I had a Western Blue do a hard brick on my laptop.When windows 10 was new.I had to switch out the hard drive for a fast ssd.

 

I don't think that is fair advice. The advice should be IMO, to avoid the "entry level" series of all manufacturers. And of course, regardless the HD used, keep frequent and viable backups of any data you don't want to lose because ALL DRIVES WILL FAIL - eventually.

Actually, these days, if the budget allows, I recommend going all SSD. But that's just me.

Ummm, not really. The Green drives were marketed as being more power efficient which was desirable for many notebook users wanting the longest battery run times. But SSDs changed that so WD no longer makes Green HDs.

No harm (except for unnecessary wear and tear on the drive and wasting your own time) but there was no need to run chkdsk /f on the drive. If you enter chkdsk /? you will see chkdsk /r "implies" /f. So when you use the /r switch, Checkdisk includes all the /f tasks in addition to those /r does.

 

Well ill consider buying a SSD ( for storage) once i can get 4-6TB for $150 or less

This drive that is giving me problems is used solely for storage and does not have an OS.

For the time being i am still not anywhere closer to accessing my data

As seen by my screenshots My OS shows that the HD has a good chunk of data in it, but when i click on it i see nothing.
Safe mode, file folder options, adding ''authenthic user'' , running checkdsk for errors etc.. all did pretty much nothing

 

You checked the wrong disk.
As per your screenshot in post #5 the drive letter is F.

 

Same drive as my opening post

I took it out of my desktop and used a dock hence why is shows F now

The odd thing is when i loaded this drive in a desktop that has a linux as the operating system i am able to see chkdsk log files and 2 chkdsk folders
Within linux the 2 folders are chkdsk 1 and chkdsk 2

chkdsk 1 folder had about 700 mb of files in there ( all broken) and chkdsk 2 folder had about 1 gb of files in there ( 2 videos which were not broken and more files and videos corrupted).

 

Well i am back to posting here again for this issue mostly to log info in case someone else searches online and has a similar issue

No suggestions i was provided ( here) helped improve my situation but then i began searching online for my issue and i stumbled across some articles that perhaps make me wonder:
Are the issues my hard drive for my drivers,bios for my computer?

It can't be that i have extremely bad luck on drives over 2TB while all drives under 2TB work just fine with my computer.

The computer i am referencing is running windows 7 64 bit home premium sp1.
The funny thing is i got a new hard drive a couple of weeks ago and i formatted it on a dock and not in this computer.
The computer i formatted it was running windows 8.1 pro 64 bit.

Since my new hard drive was 8tb i partitioned it into 3 sections 3tb/2.2tb/2tb

Prior to messing with the hard drive i ran tests for bad sectors etc and it passed everything.
But as soon as i inserted this on my windows 7 desktop 2 of the partitions vanished ( only the 3 tb one was there) and i could not get them back.
Took off the hard drive and put it into my windows 8 and windows 10 desktops and they popped back up.

I had 3 and 4TB hard drives running on this windows 7 desktop before without much issues. The issue i had with both hard drives is that one day the data disappeared all of a sudden.
I read online that some hard drives over 2 tb have a '' data time bomb'' once you start filling them over 2tb . The articles kept mentioning logical block addressing to be enabled but i can't find such a setting in my bios or what bit i even have.

I also noticed my intel rapid storage driver is fairly old ( 2010) but i don't see any new ones for Intel ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO/5 series/3400 series sata raid controller.
I found an intel rapid storage driver online for the 5 series that was a 10.1 version from 2011 or 2012 ( still pretty old driver) and installed it.
Well as soon as i install that driver my 8 tb hard drive disappeared completely from the disk management and windows could not detect it so i rolled back and it popped back up again.

The windows 7 desktop i discuss is my MAIN desktop where i do all my work and have my important files so this is why i want to install my large TB hard drives in this one.
I want to find and fix whatever is happening because i am sure if i just ignore this issue again and manage to format the hard drive correctly that my data will somehow vanish again.

My main desktop is at a point where it should be replaced with a newer modern desktop ( its running an intel 680 i5) and its about 8 years old , but it runs faster than my cheaper windows 10/8 desktops which is why i always liked using this one as a priority

 

May I just confirm that the HDD(s) are indeed using GPT and not MBR

My clear understanding is that LBA should be enabled for an Extended Partition only. The option to enable or disable LBA is not located in the bios but in disk partition editors / software eg GParted, etc