HELP!! - External Hard Drive Issue

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I have had a USB external hard drive for several years plugged into my Power G4. The partition type is Apple_HFS. Everything was fine until this morning. Out of the blue, I heard the drive turn off and back on. When OS 10.4.11 mounted the drive again it had crazy characters and the drives name had been changed to and a bunch of crazy characters that looked like files but had no size to them and when I would click on one it would disappear (see attached). The drive now reads 232GB available and 232GB available!! What?!!! I had over 98GB of files from over 10 years on this drive. I ran disk utility and there were no errors. I turned the drive off and back on with no luck. I rebooted with no luck. The drive will mount but now the partition type reads DOS_FAT_32 and all my files seem to be gone. What the heck happened and is there anyway to restore my files?

Someone PLEASE HELP!!

smartdrive-screenshot.jpg
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Try mounting the drive on another Mac to see if it can be read. It looks like the file tables have been scrambled - hopefully your data can be rescued if the drive is defective. Let us know. Post back and we'll go from there.
 

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