3 years of Photos gone! Oh pleeze HELP!

2 days ago I bought a Seagate external drive in order to move all precious photos off the main C drive that has had problems in the past when big storms hit and a shared K drive external that is bogged down with music files.
Plus this L drive is to be mine personally with no sharing of space.
I had 20 more files to move and then I was going to name them with non-conflicting dates as opposed to camera assigned numbers.. and then burn a back up to disc.
Anyway the short of it is that a mere hours before step two.. making a complete copy of the drive onto discs... all info came off the drive!!
it has the total space available as 0 bytes though the drive is 160. It also has 0 as used space and 0 capacity.
There was about 50 gig of photos off the K drive and another 20 in video.

I am scared to do anything that might overwirte over the hidden data. Surely nothing could be done accidently that could truly ERASE data?

What could have caused it? I was at the store getting a dog kennel and it happened in that hour . A one year old nosy child adn 58 year old computer disaster mom were home.
Maybe a clue?
The reason my device was exposed to people less computer literate than I, was it would not disconnect. I could not safely remove the device from my mom's HP7160. It keeps harping about a "shadow backup"? something.

I need a fast idea of what can be done, better yet how to avoid it. tyhe drive still seems to run..
Thanks

~JR
<I've had a head injury...what's YOUR excuse?>

Hard drive might be corrupt. My first line of enquiry would be to Seagate to be honest. They are best equipped to help you with this unfortunate error.

Alas, one back up is not enough, not if it's very important. I have all my music on 3 different drives - 50 gig a piece like you. I'd have to be pretty unlucky to lose them all!

__________________

How valuable were your pictures? If VERY valuable then stop using this computer right now.

Your hard drives data (your pictures) can be recovered with third party software.

You can purchase such software and try it yourself or you can take the hard drive to a shop and have them recover it.

The most important thing at this point is to not use the computer as any use will further bury the data.

This is a do it yourself guide:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139

Here are more general ideas:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...drive+recovery