Unfortunately, my WD my passport external drive now says "The file or drectory is corrupted and unreadable". A lot of the stuff is backed up, I think I may only lose some photos and some music.

However, I really would like to access the drive to see if there is anything on there that is NOT backed up that I am forgetting about and to recover any photos that aren't.

Any ideas?

phew. chkdsk/f solved the problem. backing up now!

I was going to say try that, otherwise, you could try slaving it off another hard drive and still get to the files...good job man

damn... my entire "my pictures" folder on the hard drive appears to be empty now?
photos were stored in an older folder on the same drive but I am getting a permission denied error when trying to access some of the folders. A folder with our most recent mexican vacation photos says access denied when trying to open or copy. right clicking says 0 folder 0 bytes. hmmm..

Anyway, at this point I'm just going to backup what I can. When I get home I'll look at what was backed up on my other WD drive, and hopefully little to nothing is lost.

it shows that nothing is eternal, not even eternity, because it's only a concept. it has no validity.

no media will last forever, we just have to choose the best and hope for the best.

have you tried a data recovery program? whatever you haven't written over should come up, except the file names themselves.
to be sure you will not overwrite any of your "broken" files, don't write anything on the HDD before you run the recovery program.

Any reccomended programs? I think I'm in pretty good shape as I may only lose a very small amount of photos. I backed up everything not long ago so should be in decent shape, but if I find anything to be missing I will want to try and recover it.

Then it is obvious what happened. Your wife found the pictures of your old girlfriends and Bam!

i can't recommend any as i've never lost a HDD's contents; i once replaced a drive and transferred its contents before it would break down.

if you would like to have an idea of the health state of your HDDs, and detect possible upcoming problems, try HD TUNE PRO.