How to recover 'not shown' files?

[yildizabdullah]

I have a WD 1 TB external hard drive.

It shows that 850 GB is free of 931 GB. Hence the total size of files within the drive should be ~80 GB. However, I can only access 30 GB of them. The others are not visible although I set the 'Show hidden files, folders, and drives' on Folder and search options.

Is it possible to recover them?

Running

attrib -h -r -s /s /d d:\*.*

didn't work.

 

[Megahertz07]

Did you also unset Hide Protected Operating System Files?
Schedule a check disk: chkdsk d: /f

 

[Callender]

Suggest: Try deleting any system restore points on that drive. Disable "system protection" for that drive if you don't need it.

Option One here:

System Protection Restore Points - Delete

Get WinDirStat Portable:

PortableApps.com: Portable Software/USB - Browse /WinDirStat Portable at SourceForge.net

Scan the drive and review the results.

 

[Callender]

Additional info:

Perhaps read this thread: C: Drive Used/Free Space WAY Different Than Actual?

In particular read through the information contained in the link in this post:

When explorer calculates folder disk space it only includes files that would be visible. If explorer is configured to not show hidden files they will not be counted. This was a design choice made a long time ago.

Also not included will be the System Volume Information folder and others that the user does not have access to. Even an elevated admin account cannot access this folder. As Explorer runs under the users account it is not able to access these folders either.

Calculating the space consumed by a folder in NTFS is very complex and the results are at best only an approximation. Many largely arbitrary decisions were made in the design. It is not the Windows is lying about the size. The question is: what is the truth? There are many equally valid answers and they could produce very different results.

See this for more:
Computing the size of a directory is more than just adding file sizes - The Old New Thing - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

The blog is by Raymond Chen, a developer with Microsoft.

So understand that drive size minus total size of files shown in explorer does not equal free space.

You can look at ways to free up space if you are running low on space. If files seem to get added to a drive regularly - increasing used space with no obvious cause then you could investigate. Just don't bother with adding up file or folder sizes.

 

[yildizabdullah]

Did you also unset Hide Protected Operating System Files?
Schedule a check disk: chkdsk d: /f

This is the output of attrib and chkdsk:

C:\Windows\system32>attrib -h -r -s /s /d e:\*.*
Access denied - E:\a051eec3c4402df710\$shtdwn$.req
Access denied - E:\a051eec3c4402df710\mrt.exe._p
Access denied - E:\a051eec3c4402df710\mrtstub.exe
Access denied - E:\System Volume Information

C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk e: /f
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Elements.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
  20480 file records processed.
File verification completed.
  2 large file records processed.
  0 bad file records processed.
  0 EA records processed.
  0 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
73 percent complete. (20355 of 21538 index entries processed)
Deleting an index entry from index $O of file 25.
Deleting an index entry from index $O of file 25.
  21538 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
  0 unindexed files scanned.
  0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
  20480 file SDs/SIDs processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
  530 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
  7402456 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

 976728063 KB total disk space.
  83381172 KB in 18852 files.
      7768 KB in 531 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    123907 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
 893215216 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
 244182015 total allocation units on disk.
 223303804 allocation units available on disk.