Disk corrupted, now showing empty

[tucan32]

The problem occurrence:
I Connected another usb device while transferring files to an external drive,and the system couldn't handle it. Result: the drive lost some 80gb of data but looks normal on the explorer window

Capture.JPG (11.09 KiB) Viewed 1437 times

. Yet when opened with explorer, there is nothing inside.

The bad decision:
Panic, tiredness, and impatience led me to silly pick some TestDisk actions on the problematic drive. Result: drive name is gibberish. Now i can see the contents in explorer, but they are unreadable files and folders, also in gibberish.

Undoing previous rash decision:
A long Chkdsk scan on the drive reverted it to the first step, i.e. drive shows filled, but is empty when opened through explorer.


Where am i at now? How can i first have the content displayed/usable and then -possibly- recover the lost GBs ?

[cgrenier]

You can use PhotoRec on the whole space of the partition. It will recover your data (not with the original filenames).
Be careful to store the recovered files on another disk.