The folders on my western digital passport...turned into shortcuts

I have seen this be caused by a virus before. The way I had to remove this issue was by booting the drive on a Mac and then deleting the desktop.ini files from the root drive.
If you show hidden files, you may see the virus sitting there on the root drive.
The one I encountered had an icon that appeared as a Skull with Cross Bones. Delete this file.
Try to move your files to another drive afterwards, because you will have to delete the partition, recreate a partition, and format this drive to finalize the removal of the virus.
If you don't have anything on here that is absolutely necessary to you, delete/recreate the partition and format the drive.
This link can walk you through the delete/create/format process.

Create a drive and format

Use the create process to delete the partition too.