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I have a Western Digital 2TB MyPassport external hard drive.

All of a sudden, multiple files disappeared from different folders (not all of them) and I can´t find them anymore (they´re not hidden).

Moreover, some subfolders were renamed to something odd like: S-1-5-21-937502401-1453355189-2347077675-500 and their content disappeared too, leaving only a desktop.ini file in them. The content of those desktop.ini files look something like this: 

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-8964

I´ve no idea what could´ve happened, maybe you can give me some pointers on how I can recover my data.

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The strange directories you see are recycle bin files; the same files that you said disappeared.

The string you're seeing is the file's security ID, which is what happens to files when you delete them. By turning off hidden files, you are seeing them. It essentially represents a file stuck into the recycle bin. If you restore all content in your recycle bin, I'd bet all of your files will come back.

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  • Well, restoring the recycle bin now would be really hard because it's most certainly gone by now. It's been a while since I started having this problem. Are there any solutions now? Recovery tools?
    – DaJackal
    Sep 18, 2015 at 6:59
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    @DaJackal, yes. Give any of these a shot. pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/… It's able to read some deleted files, but I cannot assure you that it will see them all. Once the memory location on the device has been written on for something else, the file is gone.
    – Ethan Z
    Sep 18, 2015 at 20:48
  • When I noticed something is wrong with the drive, I haven't done anything except reading operation from it with the hope everything will remain intact
    – DaJackal
    Sep 19, 2015 at 6:45
  • @DaJackal hopefully everything will still be there then. Give it a shot.
    – Ethan Z
    Sep 19, 2015 at 17:26

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