HDD Super Weird and scary problem. Help Pls!

[giogiocn]

I'm quite scared but seriously don't understand what could have happened.

I hope somebody may have a better idea than I do.

Here's the facts:

Yesterday morning I was working on my laptop. I have an 80gig external HD (FAT32) that I had attached to it. At some point I tried to rename one of the folders. The computer kinda freezed and I terminated the explorer as I always do when it freezes (which is not often)

Everything comes back to normal after a few seconds. I open the explorer again, go back to the directory I was working on and... What?! there's nothing on it. I think, wow! kind of strange but what the hell, it must be the computer. I restart the system almost sure that everything will be ok and... f...! it's not. the folder it's still empty!. So I freaked out and went to look on the recycler bin.. nothing. Then I thought I may have accidentally moved the files to another directory so I look. but nothing!

Please read: This hard drive had two subdirectories on the root. First directory was about 40gigs. The second was about 100megs. The whole contents of the first directory are gone! yet I can perfectly access everything on the second directory. If I check the size of the first directory it says there's nothing on it. If I check the size of the second I get 100megs. But if I check the porperties of the whole disk it says 41gigs used.!!!!!! If the files are not on the second directory and not on the first one, and not on the root... then where the hell are they!!!??? or... if thery're not there, why do I see 41gigs used when I check the poperties of the disk? How come they dissapeared while renaming one of the directories on the first folder!!!!.

I checked the computer and the disk with bitdefender and avg and found NO viruses. I checked the disk with windows diskcheck but found no errors. I haven't used any recovery software because I don't want to mess it up for real if it's not messed up already.

I'm really intrigued.

Please help!

[minsonngo]

Have you tried reverting to a previous restore point using Windows built in System Restore feature?