external hard drive is deleting itself (1 Viewer)

[stella8h8chang]

Ok crap grammar but...I usually back up to my 120gb iomega external hard drive.

Imagine my horror when I plug the hard drive into my computer, turn it on, and discover...ALL THE FILES ARE GONE

Ok. Well in truth they're not all gone, because the folders are still there.

And to make things even weirder, my brother's folder of backups (we share the hard drive) is perfectly intact. He swears that it's not some kind of sick joke. Besides, if I were playing a joke I'd back my stuff up to cds and delete it too to make it more believable.

So...what the hell happened? Is there a virus going around that does something like that? Empty your folders and leave the folders? Like every single subfolder there, it makes me feel really sick. The computer registers them all as empty; there's only 5gb out of 120gb used, and that 5gb is from my brother's folder. Mine is completely "empty"...

We have Norton on our computer that hooks up to the net (none of the others do) but maybe it didn't pick it up?

 

[sunny]

Sounds abit weird - but then I've seen USB drives wiped clean because they weren't plugged/unplugged properly. Though if the files were deleted theres a good chance they're still there and could be recovered.. Just don't write to the drive and run a file recovery program.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm