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I have a Seagate external hard-drive which normally works perfectly fine.

When I plug it in and try to open it, all my folders show as shortcuts. When I attempt to open the shortcuts, it tells me "Windows cannot open 'said folder' please make sure the name is typed correctly an then try again."

Right-clicking my external hard-drive from "My Computer" shows it still has 80GB or whatever taken up. So I know my movies and such are still on there, but I can't access any of them.

Is this a virus attack or something? Help.

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1 Answer

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Shortcuts are static references to files and not to files themselves. If you right click and view the properties of the shortcut, does the "Target" location exist?

For example if the shortcut was created on a computer and the videos were mapped to the G:\Videos and on your computer the portable drive is mapped as E:\Videos then the shortcut would still be pointing to G:\Videos, which doesn't exist on your computer.

It's probably better to access the raw file rather than a shortcut.

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every photo, movie, song i have ever had on my computer was placed onto this hard-drive, and then deleted off my computer to keep space and such. when i right click on the shortcut folder in the hard-drive the location shows as "%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c "start %cd%RECYCLER\148160cc.exe &&%windir%\explorer.exe %cd%My Pictures" when i run a virus scan on my hard-drive... i can see the names and folders of everything on my hard-drive, but cant seem to access them.. im sorry, im not very tech-savy – jonathan Gordon Oct 9 '12 at 5:06
%windir% refers to your Windows directory whereas %CD% usually means change directory. If you see a bunch of little triangles in the corner of these icons, they're all shortcuts to the actual files on the old computer, which means you might also only have deleted the shortcuts and not the raw files. The fact that they all have a "Target" in the properties means that they are shortcuts and not the original files. – JKM Oct 9 '12 at 5:23
i figured it out, thank you – jonathan Gordon Oct 9 '12 at 5:33
Excellent, if my answer helped, please accept it as the correct answer :) – JKM Oct 9 '12 at 5:33

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