External Hard Disk Folder is displayed as File

Unfortunately, we see this all too often. External HDDs simply aren't that reliable or long lasting. When we purchase an external hard drive, we always purchase a second one so we can make a backup of the first.

Sometimes, running CHKDSK on the external drive will repair things. Sometimes not, so....

My recommendation is to make a copy of all the data from the problem external drive to another location. If you like using external hard drives, make one copy to a new drive and another copy somewhere else. Once that's done, open an elevated command prompt, then type the following into Command Prompt: chkdsk E: /f /x /r Replace the letter E with the letter corresponding to your external hard drive. Once that's done, press "Enter", then press "Y" if the command window asks you to. Restart the computer to run the disk check upon reboot. The check will take quite a while and don't be surprised if the percentage listing "holds" at 10% or so. Just let the check do its thing till it finishes.

Hope this helps.

Grif

If your LG can use the HDD as a DVR then you can expect the attached drive to get wiped out at times.
Samsung and others do warn about this issue and some ignore it and this happens.

To see if you can recover files try RECUVA. But this is all about keeping your files safe. Never keep files you can't lose on a single device or location.