Windows 10: Was moving files to external drive, drive not recognized and lost all

NavyLCDR,
No, I always select that option in explorer when that drive or any drive is attached so the fact that it did not show them when it was attached never happened before now. In fact I just connected the Seagate drive to run the diskcheck and this time it showed the files so there is a problem somewhere as it did not do that on the previous 2 times I attached it to run the screen shots for the disk management.

It sounds from your previous response that if the folder does not show in the check disk that the information is lost -- is that correct? I do not understand how that can be correct because the Seagate drive is still saying I am using the missing 100GB of data that I was moving. If the drive is still allocating that storage space for that folder the folder must still be there although it is not showing up in the file explorer -- until that space is freed up the data must still be there. Even when an item is deleted the data in that storage address is still there until something else is stored in that address. The fact that space is still allocated as being in use indicates to me that the data is still there and I cannot overwrite it because the system is not providing access to that space.

That folder was still showing up in the folder history until the updates for windows were done so the Acer Laptop was still pointing to that folder until those updates were applied (it was saying it could not access the Seagate drive that it was saying was in location F although it is now saying it is location E). I wonder if a restore point was created or if an earlier restore will show that folder -- at a minimum there has to be software that allows recovery of folders especially if the space is still unavailable for other data to replace those 100GB. You may be correct but the drive itself has not allocated that space to be overwritten because that space is not available. I have not added or deleted anything to that Seagate drive since this problem. I think I remember this type of thing happening to other external drives where folders will disappear for a period of time and then reappear -- I am pretty certain I have seen that so I am not ready to throw in the towel.

I remember there were more than 300GB available the night before this problem occurred when I moved a few files from the WD Elements to the Seagate. I had already moved some additional files before this happened and now the Seagate is saying there are only about 198GB available -- so while I understand what you are saying there is no way the drive could be missing that much storage and the folder not be there. Like I said the night before I was moving the files with a Sony Laptop but when the problem happened I was using an Acer Laptop -- I suspect that the problem lies within the Windows 10 OS and its failure to correctly point to the drives from one Laptop to another.

However, if you are saying that you have no more options available for me then I thank you for your assistance and I will surf the web to find a solution. These files are very important to me as it relates to health treatment for a family member suffering from Alzheimer's so I have to find a way to retrieve it even if I have to try a Data Recovery Toolkit. Again, if you have no further suggestions I thank you for your assistance.

 

You can try MiniTool recovery:
MiniTool data recovery software – Power Data Recovery and Mac Data Recovery.