Files on external hard drive now Inaccessible

Hello,
I am currently using a 2010 13 inch 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook and running OSX Lion (I upgraded in July from Snow Leopard). I have recently come across a problem with my computer recognizing files that are on my external hard drive.
This past Friday (October 7th, 2011), I connected my external hard drive to a PC running Windows XP in order to copy a file over for school. The file that was copied over was a folder containing GIS (Geographical Information Systems) -related files. These files are not usable on Macs because the ArcGIS software is only available on Windows. In the past, these files have of course not been recognizable but it had no influence on my computer's ability to recognize all of the other files on my external hard drive. When I plugged the hard drive back into my Mac this past Sunday (October 9th, 2011), none of the folders or files that were previously there were visible. Instead, the hard drive contained files of the same names as my folders and with the extension ".lnk" Apparently this is some sort of Windows file. The strange thing is, I have connected to PCs running Windows XP before and this has not happened in the past.
To reitterate, my external hard drive was full of folders which had been usable by both Macs and PCs alike, but now they are no longer visible and instead all that is viewable on my external hard drive are files with the extension ".lnk" My Mac has always been able to view these files, but now they no longer appear.
Strangely enough, when I connected my external hard drive to my professor's MacBook Pro (I'm not sure of the specifications) running OSX Leopard, all of my files and folders were visible and useable. The files with the ".lnk" extension remained, but the files and folders that were not visible on my machine were now visible and useable.
Currently, when I plug in and open my external hard drive on my Mac this is what I see. Normally all of these files (except the MediaID.bin file) would appear as normal blue folders, but as you can see, they are no longer accessible. How can I fix this? Is there a way that I can get my Mac to start recognizing the files on my external hard drive again? Or do I have to revert to an older version of OSX? Please help!
Thanks!

.lnk file are alias file on windows. Such alias coudn't be read by Mac OS X.
The strange thing is, that there are folders visible on your professors MacBook.
Open Terminal.app (Applications > Utilities) and type in
ls -la /Volumes/DATA
Hit enter and post the output here.

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