Files disappeared On Maxtor External HD

I have been using my maxtor external hard drive to keep most of my music files and documents. I had also installed nfts for my mac so that I could transfer files onto the hard drive (so that it was not read only). This had been working for the last 3 weeks. today, after i transferred some pictures to my external hard drive, ejected it, and switched it off, I tried to access it again 3 hrs later. The get info on the "new folder" showed that the same amount of space was taken up, but when i went to my pictures folder in the "new folder", 0 items showed up. Also, when i right click to get info on the my pictures folder, it says 0 kb. Have I lost all my photos? I can still access my other folders on the drive such as word documents and mp3s. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is all on a new silver Macbook.

Do you have windows installed on that mac, or a windows PC anywhere?

You will have to run Chkdsk from Windows to check the health of that NTFS drive

found this on a forum, not sure if that would do:

How mysterious! I found one instance of someone having trouble
moving a drive between XP and a MAC, and having files disappear
because of a setting in XP. See if this makes a difference:

while you're in Windows XP, check the properties of the folders
to make sure that the multimedia features are turned off.


Another user stopped having files disappear when he removed
the USB driver for the drive!


It may also have to do with having write-caching enabled for
the drive, which creates a delay in writing the files to the
disk. This MS article may shed some light on the situation:

Windows XP and Surprise Removal of Hardware

I'm having same problem.
See my post:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/ot...s-dissapears-sata2-hard-drive.html#post820218

Though it was caused by SATA2 at first, but not sure now cause I've seen many forum posts by people not mentionning SATA at all.