unable to see my WD external hard disk content after scanning

sandyloggs

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Jul 13, 2015
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My WD external hard disk was having a lot of viruses. So i scanned it with Avas free antivrus. After the scan i found out a lot of viruses. so i deleted all the viruses. They were mostly executable file. I remember there was not any system file bein deleted. But as soon as i am done with that i cannot see my content. Although my External hard disk is been shown full by system properties, but on opening it i cannot see any content. I have also tried viewing all thehidden files but still impossible to find all my files.
 
Welcome to the community, sandyloggs!

I'm sorry to hear about your WD external HDD. :( I'd recommend you to try connecting the drive to another computer and see if your files will be accessible there. Another thing you can try is using another anti-virus software and scan your external again.
You can give some third-party data recovery tools a try as well and see they can make your data visible, unfortunately, nobody can determine how successful that attempt would be. ( http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/291895-32-best-data-recovery-software )
Either way, I'd strongly recommend you to test the HDD's health using WD's Data LifeGuard Diagnostics by running both the quick and extended test. The tool also gives you the option to fully erase your external HDD by writing zeros on the HDD sectors. This, however, would erase all the data on the external to the point of no return, so I'd suggest you running the WRITE ZEROS command only after you've recovered your files. Here's a link to the software: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=0h5J2j
How to test the drive's health: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=8kKppF
How to low level format or write zeros to the drive: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=iUElG4

Hope this helps. Keep me posted! :)
SuperSoph_WD