Hard Drive Files vanished

[wellwish3r]

I know this sounds like im a retard, but it seriously happened. I got a new 500GB HDD, and copied about 50GBs on it two days ago. Today i copied another ~220GBs on there, shut down the computer, and plugged the HDD into my laptop. Any file organizing i did after copying the 220GBs is gone, most (not all for some reason) and most of the 220GBs of data is gone as well.
When plugging it back into my desktop, i can't see those files either, so they just seem to have disappeared.
But the really weird thing is, that the computer still tells me that 283GBs of the HDD are used up, eventhough the files that are still shown are only roughly 65GBs in size. I cant find those "ghost" 200GBs anywhere on the hardrive, and searching for vanished files doesnt yield a result either.

So my question, what is going on and can I restore those files somehow (cause i allready deleted them from my PC...)

OS: Win7 Ultimate x64

 

[Lyerae]

Are they hidden?

 

[Avaleirra]

System restore fixes everything

 

[wellwish3r]

System restore fixes everything

Maybe, but not if you cant use it because the HDD and the OS are new, and dont have any restore points for the partition that the files came from, neither where they were moved to.

 

[Nenad]

Organize->Folder and Search Options->Second Tab->Show hidden files, folders etc. Make them unhidden :thup:

 

[AnthraxXx]

I have a feeling they aren't hidden.

This happened to my PSP memory stick, I had 1GB of nothing on there, I managed to fix it.

You say the external is NEW, right? Well, format it. Either with eXFAT, Fat32 or NTFS. A quick format will do. It should work then.

You should always format new USB's, HDD's etc when you get them.

Hope this helped.

EDIT: I re-read your post and found you wanted to recover those files... You may want to try using a program called "Recuva" (It's free) or "Undelete". However, I suspect the files on the HDD are corrupted, so I would not be surprised if they are lost forever.

 

[wellwish3r]

The files are not hidden and i did format the HDD before i used it. The problem with restoring the old files to the Recycle Bin is that i didnt actually delete them, I moved the directly onto the new HDD. They all worked fine until i shut down the PC (the normal way).

What still dont understand is why the HDD got basically "reseted" to how it was 24hrs prior to when i copied the files over, even things that i deleted are restored, more or less like the HDD restored itself to that point.

Ill try Recuva anyways, since it probably wont do any more harm...

 

[DDRtists]

System restore fixes everything

System Restore doesn't touch anything file related other than your Program Files. In other words, your music, documents, pictures, ect. will not be restored or saved. It doesn't touch your MyDocuments folder.

 

[wellwish3r]

The files are not hidden and i did format the HDD before i used it. The problem with restoring the old files to the Recycle Bin is that i didnt actually delete them, I moved the directly onto the new HDD. They all worked fine until i shut down the PC (the normal way).

What still dont understand is why the HDD got basically "reseted" to how it was 24hrs prior to when i copied the files over, even things that i deleted are restored, more or less like the HDD restored itself to that point.

Ill try Recuva anyways, since it probably wont do any more harm...

EDIT: Recuva found nothing...

 

[Prometheus]

If you format, go with NTFS. Anything else is just older tech.

 

[Ensabahnur]

I suggest searching for the files on both hard drives, do you know the name of one of them, you can use * as a wild card.