I'm not very computer literate; I'll try to be as concise as possible.

My PC had a bug and needed reformatting, so I recently backed up everything onto a portable 750 GB Toshiba Canvio 3.0 hard drive. I was going to reformat yesterday afternoon, but it crashed in the morning. I was listening to a podcast that was on the portable drive (hooked up to the pc) when the PC crashed. I got a message saying it would shut down in 60 seconds so save any unsaved work, so I quickly copied my up-to-date writing folder to the portable.

When I turned the PC back on, obviously I wasn't surprised it was wiped out and wouldn't open any programs, but the portable was also showing as an empty folder. I plugged it into a laptop to see the same thing. Thing is, it still says there's 500 GB of data on it. So after reformatting the PC, I found the error-checking function under the Tools tab in the portable drive's Properties, and I checked both boxes (Automatically fix file system errors, and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors), and it ran an 8 hour scan of all of the thousands of files, at the end saying no errors were found. But it's still an empty folder while showing 500 GB of used space.

So, or is there any way to find my data on this portable, or am I just SOL?