Hi, I just backed up my Western Digital My Book Home Premium onto my desktop then formatted the External HDD. When I moved the files back onto the WD External Hard Drive I let the computer do its thing and i left for about an hour and a half (it said it would be 2 1/2 hour long copy. When I got back the computer was locked up, when the computer restarted everything in the WD came up in Encrypted names (I think there were encrypted), like this: ╖<ΓΘá│f.y<. And µÖY&█r. The name of the Drive use to be My Book now its 3Ç. It has tens of dozens of Folders when I only copied 4 or 5 (all of the files in the external hard drive was a total of 265 GB). Now there is over 150 files and folders, and some folders are hidden. I desperately need all of the data on here, as it has all of my data for work. I have used a program called Recuva to restore some of the files, but most of them don't open correctly or music wont play, videos dont come up, its very frustrating. Please help me, I need the files!

Can anyone help me? Pls!

When you restored the files, did you save them to the same drive that you were recovering the info from? Or did you save the restored files to a different drive? If you saved them to the same drive your info may be lost permanently. If you didn't, I would recommend using a different recovery program. Is your computer connected to a surge protector? Something caused the files to be corrupted during the transfer process, unless you had a virus on your system that copied over and executed during the process. Jarvis-Technician TekTime www.time4tech.com

Firstly why did you feel the need to format the external drive? was there a problem before you copied the files over? When you say you moved the files back, do you mean that you actually used the cut and paste option, or did you just drag the files across to the external drive. I'm just trying to folow what you actually did and why, as it may shed some light on resolving the problem.

Take it to a shop for data recovery. The problems you are seeing is not generally repairable by an average user. In the future if the space is not an immediate need the best choice is to copy, not move since this allows you to verify the files are reading correctly on the destination. If as anmor asked you did a move the recovery chance might not be good. Richard

When i recovered it to the computer, i did recover them to the same drive because i didn't have anywhere do put it. I do have a surge protector for my pc. There were no problems before. Its a long story ill tell at the end of the post. I used cut and paste because copy said it would take up to 3 days. The story goes like this: I have an old Compaq R4000 laptop that had a hard drive go out, so I thought i would plug in the external hard drive and re-install Windows XP back on it to see if i could read any data on the internal HDD. I read up online that you could install Windows on a external HDD, everywhere the answer was always a yes, but I found out the hard way that you could not. Unfortunately I read that in order to install Windows XP on it, you had to reformat it and make sure everything was gone, to make a fresh start. (Ya, I know, i'm a retard) Well when i found out I couldn't i started moving it all back on, but something happened i guess and everything became Corrupt or Encrypted. Also, Western Digital said on there website that they would try to reply with in 1 day, but a maximum of 3 days, I sent the e-mail on July 24th, but today is August 3rd, I don't think there replying. :(