HD Problem - Help Needed

I have a WD 4 TB My Book HD for Mac to which I was backing up photos. Suddenly, all except one of many folders containing the photos disappeared. Mac Disk Utility First Aid didn't find any problems. It shows 580.82 GB on the HD (the folders containing the photos) though they are not visible. Get Info shows 305 MB on the HD, which is the size of the only visible folder.

I also ran WD Drive Utilities. Drive Status Check and Quick Drive Test shows no problems. Complete Drive Test hung up at 10% and quit.

Any idea what caused this and how to fix it? Thanks.

Peter

Followup: When I remount the HD to the desktop the folders and the individual photos within them show up in the trash. But still do not appear on the HD itself. When I drag the individual photos out of the trash to the desktop they open without any problem.

Bottom Line: Photos are still there but not visible on the HD. How do I make them visible again?

Did you try to move them from the trash to the WD hard drive? Sounds like you accidentally moved them to the trash (which is easy to do with the wrong mouse click). If they are still on the WD drive and you are trying to move them from the trash to that drive you will get a prompt asking if you want to replace the existing files with the ones you are moving. Then you will know that they are still on that drive and just don't show.

That did the trick! Many thanks Jens.

Peter

P.W.Post wrote:That did the trick! Many thanks Jens.

Peter

Glad I could help.

You may wonder why 580GB still showed on the HD in Disk Utility but you couldn't see the files on the HD in the Finder. Well, even when the files are trashed they still are stored on the HD. If you would have disconnected that drive from your Mac, those files would not have shown in the Trash.

Jens Peermann wrote:

P.W.Post wrote:That did the trick! Many thanks Jens.

Peter

Glad I could help.

You may wonder why 580GB still showed on the HD in Disk Utility but you couldn't see the files on the HD in the Finder. Well, even when the files are trashed they still are stored on the HD. If you would have disconnected that drive from your Mac, those files would not have shown in the Trash.

Jens:

Thanks for taking the time to post this explanation. I knew that the files in the trash counted towards the total gigabytes on my computer, but just didn't connect it to the current situation. I wasn't thinking.

Peter

Jens:

Thanks for taking the time to post this explanation. I knew that the files in the trash counted towards the total gigabytes on my computer, but just didn't connect it to the current situation. I wasn't thinking.

Peter

It seems like a weird way Apple set this up, but it's actually quite useful for deleting files from SD cards without having to re-format the card. Just select all image files you want to delete, then right click on the selected files and choose "Move to Trash" from the pop-up menu. Then, while the card is still in the computer, open the Trash folder and click on "Empty Trash". Voilá your card is still formatted but totally empty and ready to go. This works when the card is inserted in the slot on the computer, when it's inserted in a card reader, or if it's in a camera that's tethered to the Mac.