My WD BOOK does not showing any files

[valiakuta]

Hello Gurus!
I own a WD500 external usb drive MyBook Home Edition (FAT32)
I found out that "my BOOK",lost all files I had written on it!
the weird stuff is that I can see it in the explorer and in the device manager but when I browse Its Like its empty!
When I click "properties" It is showing that its not empty!
355GB of 499GB are filled..
I tried chkdsk in windows,
TestDisk cant fid them...
Recuva also..
What can I do?
I tried GetDataBack and RecoverMyFiles but my "Western Digital" is an usb - external and 355 of 500 Gigabytes filled,so if I want to recover It I sould do what:
Re-write using another drive(of about 400GB) in other words buy another one???
Is there any tool that could help me??? :vo:

[dick]

"Western Digital" is an usb - external and 355 of 500 Gigabytes filled,so if I want to recover It I sould do what:
Re-write using another drive(of about 400GB) in other words buy another one???
Is there any tool that could help me???

Yes buy another one. They are cheap and you seem to consider your data as valuable so you need to keep a backup!

Anyway you are going to need to recover to a 2nd drive.

Probably the best way is to remove the drive from the usb caddy and mount it in a desktop pc with the new drive you want to recover to. Again you might need a 3rd drive or at least a bootable partition on your new replacement to boot to windows and run your prefered recovery software unless you boot and run software from cd media.

As a test you could boot the pc with a dos/windows 98 floppy disk. Can you then see the folders and files on the faulty fat32 drive? Often you can in these situations.

I would think most recovery tools would recover your data but the cheapest I know of is ZAR and you can get it here: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/ Keep an eye open for the half price deals at night and at weekends!