Issue I have never seen or heard before.

So I am here in Afghanistan and have my new laptop with me and a TB external loaded with movies. One day I plugged it in to watch a movie, and it won't work. All the folders now showed as shortcuts and there were several "link files" that were named z followed by 2 other letter such as zzt, zur, and so on. It also added a few other files in.

Now I thought at first this may have been because I had plugged it into a government computer and it was just security measures on their end or something so i formatted the drive. In the meantime I recieved the other TB drive i had bought as that first was full (prior to formatting it) and loaded a bunch of movies on it. It worked fine for a few days then did the same thing. all the folders are unclickable. If you do, they just sit there with the little windows 7 busy icon for a few seconds then nothing.

I called Western Digital to ask them about it as they were both identical WD my passport drives, but they did not know, and in the process I saw that my SD card I had in the system was also doing it.

I tried to load a few pictures on here today with my SD card and it was the same thing. I formatted the card, and to test it, I removed it from the system and put it back in and those files and folders appeared on it again. Below is a screen shot of the files it loads. Checking the properties of the folders shows the Target Type as a screensaver.

I was going to format my OS partition and reinstall, but can not locate the disc at the moment so I decided to post here and see if anyone had ever seen or heard of this.

Try a system restore before you format hard drive to a known date that was good before problem started.

I would question the root folder of all those other user folders. I'm referring to what shows in the left tree named "Secure Digital Storage". If you attempted to move all your user files at one time, it might have placed them in an unknown directory and thus the reason for seeing what should be the folders instead of shortcuts to them.

Try right clicking on whats shown in the middle (any shortcut like music, or movies) and click properties. What should show is a button to click to take you to the root folder (its true location).

I would find out where exactly all these user folders that are showing as shortcuts are truly located.

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Added: But try Jacee's suggestions first, ...very knowledgeable!!!

Good Luck

Why would any body plug a laptop full of movies into a secure U.S. government net. I got to believe that if it's a American government/ military secure site you are breaking many security regulation.

It looks to me the OP just made shortcuts of his user folders in different locations. .....dunno

It was an MWR system. People plug external devices into them all the time. It wasn't a secure system. I know better than that.

No I did not create shortcuts and place them in there. That screenshot was taken of my SD card after I had formatted it. It was empty, and when I put it back in the media slot all those items appear on it. If there were folders on the device originally, then those would be inaccessable.

Attempting to download that other program that was suggested.