Hardware :: USB Hard Drive Not Reading / All Files And Folders In Partition Disappeared?

I have been backing up onto a 60G ext2/3/4 partition on a 1TB external USB hard disk for a year or so now and have built up a few folders of .thunderbird, .mozilla, and other assorted files - using this as my standard "backup system" - but suddenly all the files and folders in this partition seem to have disappeared.

In Gparted and KParted the partition shows up as the correct size with the correct amount of "used space" (= yellow coloured portion), as it does when running offof any CD/standalone OS. And the small bars under the volume names in Dolphin show about the right amount having been "used" too.But however I try to access this partition (or, to be correct LVM I spose:-)) it still always comes up as empty - ie 0 files in it. After months of working just fine.The NTFS partition on the same external USB sdd reads and writes quite OK/normally and also shows the correct amount of "used space" - but even from root I can't see any of the old files in, or read/write to the linux one. It comes up with "Denied"/"Can't Write to.." errors when trying to write anything to it.

I ran a freeware utility called DiskInternals Linux-Recovery from winDoze which, after half an hour, came up with a list showing all the folders and files in the partition. It said that they would be written back onto the hard drive that they were "retrieved" from - but no change happened - still no contents showing when booting up in any linux.

Running a clean install of FedoraCore14 on an AMDAthlonx2 5000 (= 2.6G true) on an ASUS M2N-MX SE PLUS m/b with 2G of RAM