I just purchased a Western Digital Essential SE 1TB external hard drive from Best Buy at their recommendation. I then exchanged it for a Toshiba Canvio (I think that was the name).

I have a Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q898. The Canvio locked up my computer and rewrote some kind of OS file, and erased all the restore points as well as the system image backup (according to Best Buy) just by plugging it in for the first time. Never even got to the install part or anything -- plugged it in and fried my computer.

They spent about an hour and a half on my computer and got it back to a somewhat working condition and gave me access to my files. So now they say I have to back it up using my recovery disk and rewriting my OS.

Enter the Essential. Brought it home last night, plugged it in and installed everything. Works perfect, no problems. Backed up everything on it. I unplugged and plugged it twice to make sure that everything was on it. Essential told me it had both the HDD and SSD backed up.

So I reinstalled my OS. Plugged the Essential in and everything loads right up. Went to retrieve my files and the Western Digital has nothing on it. It shows all my music, pics, ETC. as still being on my computer and needing to be backed up, but since there are no files on my computer now. Where is this information coming from and where did my files go? It's about 810GB worth of files I've amassed over several years.

Is there any way to recover data from this? I plan to contact Western Digital and Best Buy, just thought I would check here too. Any advice will be appreciated as a lot of these files are invaluable to me.