Inaccessible data on hard drive

I have a Maxtor external hard drive hooked up to my PC that contains my data files. While I can see that there is space being used and a a limited amount of files and folders are displayed, they are not the files I would be using. The ones available are:

FOUND.000 - Folder (contains files named FILE0000.CHK, FILE0001.CHK, etc.)
Recycled
System Volume Information - Folder
autorun.inf
mxoicon.ico
Thumbs.db

I have been told that this may be the result of a virus that hides your files/folders, but I am not sure if this is a hardware failure.

In addition, the PC has been running slowly prior to this.

If this does appear to be a virus and should be moved to that forum, please accept my apologies in advance.

Thank you for your help.

 

What is a Found.000 Folder?

 

See Above - I did a chkdsk on the drive -

Thanks,
Jim

 

Here's a quote from the page linked to above.

You may want to run the hard drive manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics next. If you see errors there as well, the hard drive is failing and needs to be replaced.

To run the diags, download and burn the Ultimate Boot CD to CD. It has all the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities, (plus much more). Simply boot your computer from this CD and select the utility you want to run.

If you aren't sure who made the hard drive in your computer, use Seagate's Seatools as it will work with most any make of drive.

The following instructions may prove helpful for burning the UBCD .iso file to disc:
How can I write (burn) ISO files to CD or DVD?

 

Doc -

To reiterate this is an external hard drive, my C drive is fine and my other external is fine also - All Diagnostics Run - No Errors Found - If you Look at the drive under properties you see that the usual space allocation is indicated but I can't see the files

Thanks
Jim

 

If you think Windows, or malware is hiding files, boot from a different Operating System to view what's on the drive. (Knoppix Live CD [free]).

There is also still a slim chance of flaky/failing hardware. Maybe not the hard drive itself but the SATA/IDE-to-USB adapter within the external enclosure. To eliminate that possibility, remove the hard drive from the enclosure and either hook it directly to a computer, or to a different, known-good SATA/IDE-to-USB adapter.

If you think everything is fine, and the files might have just been deleted, you might try Recuva (free).

If still no luck, try Ontrack. They may not be cheap but, if you "gotta have" your files ...