External HD Properties

A friend gave me his 200gb external USB hard drive 'cuz he has many gigs of music and video on it that he thought had just vanished. If you take a look at the drive properties and look at the usage pie graph, it shows 154gb used. But if you open the drive in My Computer to look at the contents, it shows 2 folders totalling about 20gb, and 2 zipped files totalling maybe 5gb. So, that leaves a remainder of approximately 130gb of 'vanished' music, videos, pictures, etc. So I enabled the viewing of hidden files/folders and VOILA'!!! There's all his 'missing' data. So I looked at the individual properties for each folder, and the box for "Hidden" is checked (duh) but is also grayed out and therefore cannot be un-checked. So, how do change the properties for the entire drive so all the folders become un-hidden??

Thanks.

(oh yeah... Win XP Pro SP2 :-o )

 

Only SIX views in 4+ hours?!?!?!? Maybe I chose a bad title for this thread :confused I should have said "External Hard Drive Properties" instead of the "HD" that I used.... maybe the HD is throwing people off.... anyway, if anyone has any input, regardless of how off-base they may think it is, I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks.

 

Here's how I did it.... go to a command prompt (click Start > Run and type cmd and press Enter). Then use the attrib command with the appropriate switches, and it's all good. Suppose you have a folder called "Folder123" and it's hidden, read-only, and is falsely set as a system file. The folder is on drive G:
%SystemRoot%:\>attrib -s -r -h G:\Folder123
and press Enter (-s is for system files; -r is for read only; -h is for hidden files; the opposite would be to use +h to hide a file; +r to set read only, etc; so the - is to disable and the + is to enable; the command is in bold print so you would NOT type "%SystemRoot%:\>" )
I'm sure there's a way to change an entire external drive and all its folders with one command, but I couldn't figure it out, so I did each folder individually. If the folders have spaces in their names (like "Folder 123" instead of "Folder123") you have to rename it so there's no space (it took me about 25 maddening minutes to figure out that spaces cause the command to misread the parameters and error out :banghead).

 

hello dlb. Does this mean that you can thank yourself? would that even count?(Congratulations, by the way).

 

LOL I have a bunch of threads like this. Where I start off asking for help, then I post my progress, then, finally, the solution to the original problem.

Thanks! :celebrate