External Storage Data Erased without Notification

Hello,

When I connect my WD Passport (1TB) to my HP Mini notebook at one point, I could not access my data anymore.

The external drive icon does appear in My Computer but when I no longer able to view the data in the external HDD.

1) when i plug the external HDD to the notebook, it takes longer detect

2) the HDD spinning sounds normal

3) Under Properties of the external HDD shows 0 bytes but I have used at least 95% of the storage

4) I could not format the HDD; right click on the HDD icon and click Format but nothing happen

5) Under disk management, I am able to
a) see the external HDD drive showing statuses as Layout: "Partition", Type: "Basic", File System: Blank, Status: "Healthy", Capacity: "100% Free", Fault Tolerance: "No" & Overhead: "0%"
b) able to assign the disk letter to another alphabet

6) I could not access the data when I plug the external HDD to my Macbook Pro but the data capacity shows around 95% utilized

On another occasion, I plug my SanDisk SDHC card (8GB) which I use it for my camera to the same notebook to view the photos and suddenly everything is gone.

1) It took longer to load

2) When the loading is done, it prompted to format the flash card

3) When I plug to the Macbook Pro, it prompted unrecognized format

My questions are:
1) Can I retrieve the data from the external HDD & the flash card?

2) Is the USB port in the notebook causing my data virtually erased or permanently lost?

3) Could it be due to Virus or firmware issue?

Really appreciate your valuable reply on the above queries.

You can try recuva on your flash drive.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

You may be able to get the data back on your hard drive with testdisk.

http://fileforum.betanews.com/deta [...] 80970951/1

You stated, File System: Blank which means windows doesn't think it's formatted. testdisk should be able to set it so that windows knows it's a NTFS disk.