Help! I inadvertantly might have messed up my external hard drive

So far it is finding all the folders.....kinda happy about that

IMO, neither Windows nor any other conventional partition/formatting utility is going to touch the 700MB VCD partition which is in the UDF format as per your screenshot.( These may deal with the rest of the WD HDD.)

Do put in a screenshot of how your Western Digital HDD presents itself in the Disk Management.

Then we can try to decipher ways and means of getting it annihilated.

gregrocker said:

What's showing up in Explorer is likely only the crapware which comes preinstalled on the HD which is best deleted or wiped off the HD with Diskpart Clean Command so it doesn't interfere.

When an external doesn't show up correctly in Explorer, I try to run a Disk Check on it and if that doesn't see it often times Partition Wizard's Check File System function will bring it back to life. How to Check File System? Partition Wizard Video Help.

This is especially likely to work since data Recovery sees your data.

Thanks for that info, for now I am gonna let Ease US Data Recovery tool do its job, I have never been able to take that other crapware off of that hard drive and because of that, it has been a constant pain in my arse. After I get all my nfo recovered I will try that software to remove that crapware.

This seems to do the job the best and since it's from WD would preserve any warranty: How to remove (disable / hide) the Virtual CD (VCD) for Windows or Mac OSX on a WD My Book or WD My Passport

There is a long thread with complaints and various attempts here: How do I remove this smartware software from my dr... - Western Digital Community

gregrocker said:

This seems to do the job the best and since it's from WD would preserve any warranty: How to remove (disable / hide) the Virtual CD (VCD) for Windows or Mac OSX on a WD My Book or WD My Passport

There is a long thread with complaints and various attempts here: How do I remove this smartware software from my dr... - Western Digital Community

OH Cool! Thanks for that info, I will definitely check that out!

The relevant questions here are:

1. Have you installed the Smartware and using it to backup your system?

2. Do you need the VCD feature that does the Hardware encryption or locking and unlocking the drive?

WD SmartWare FAQ - Western Digital Community

If you are not using the Smartware and the VCD enabled lock-unlock, just to hide the VCD, you will be installing another bit of garbageware " WD Smartware Virtual CD Manager" :)

As far as Smartware is concerned it has been rightly termed 'garbageware" by thousands of users expressing anger and agony in many threads in the WD community forum - including their latest version 1.6.2.

To thousands of users asking WD on how to remove the VCD, this is the reply:

"You buy a lockable drive and it comes with the necessities for locking and unlocking it; you buy a plain drive and you get a plain drive. Seems straight-forward.

As WD has repeatedly said, the VCDs will not be being removed from the lockables any time in the forseeable future -- that's why they sell the other lines of drives. And even if they did happen to remove them from future drives, that still won't change the one you've bought. It was built as being lockable. And so it shall remain, whether you hide the VCD"

An exasperated user commented:

"I started this thread. I was hoping for a solution, and you have it.

Just stop buying WD, and sell the one you have. I did and have no more problems with the VCD.I removed the VCD from my computer by unplugging the drive and selling it. I now steer clear of any WD product."

Now it is your drive - your concern - Try killing VCD once for all and use it as a plain drive to be used as any other external HDD or hide the pest and close your eyes to it. :)

( Not that I am a WD-basher. One of my Media Centers runs on WD drives in RAID 0. But now I go with Seagate only for externals.)

Well folks....I used EaseUS data recovery and it has located all my files and is now asking where to recover the files to, the only place I have with enough room IS the hard drive that I am recovering from!, but when I point it to the hard drive it has a window pop up asking to reformat it. Do I throw the dice and risk erasing the information that I am trying to recover by reformatting the hard drive that it is sitting on or do I just leave the program open and go buy a new external HD?
Or should I try to find an online storage site? if so then which one is a good one? is there any that do a trial period?

Birddude007 said:

Well folks....I used EaseUS data recovery and it has located all my files and is now asking where to recover the files to, the only place I have with enough room IS the hard drive that I am recovering from!, but when I point it to the hard drive it has a window pop up asking to reformat it. Do I throw the dice and risk erasing the information that I am trying to recover by reformatting the hard drive that it is sitting on or do I just leave the program open and go buy a new external HD?
Or should I try to find an online storage site? if so then which one is a good one? is there any that do a trial period?

Dropbox gives you 5 GB of storage free I believe, and SkyDrive gives you 7 GB per account I think.

Did you ever try my suggestion to run Partition Wizard Partition Recovery Wizard - Video Help which very reliably will recover an entire deleted or missing partition to the same HD if it hasn't been partitioned over?

If you instead now feel stuck having started out with the last-resort data recovery with an app that is not recommended here, I would borrow another external HD unless you have a stable network which will reliably transfer files to another PC. I would not attempt to save the files to the same HD.