Accidentally deleted entire external drive using terminal!

wow I never thought this would happen to me but it did....
Upon trying to eject my external drive, I get the "cannot eject drive because it is busy" error. Looking around, it seems to be a spotlight indexing problem according to this page
http://itsmetommy.com/2011/12/11/the-volume-cant-be-ejected-because-its-currentl y-in-use/
in which the blogger happily and liberally uses the rm -rf command.
"No problem" I thought. Easy fix!
To my horror, I accidentally typed
sudo rm -rf /Volumes/"external drive"/
It said "drive busy"
Took a minute for the realization of what I had just done to sink in. I still am in shock.
but the damage has already been done, to my drive and ego
Am I completely stuck? Have I just lost all of my 175+ ripped movie collection that i can't recreate because I don't have most of the discs anymore?
Just shoot me now and get it over with

File recovery software: Try using an application such as Data Rescue 3 - http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php or FileSalvage - http://subrosasoft.com, or one of the ones listed in the link below. Some have free trial versions that let you see if the software will help before you decide to buy. You will also need a second hard drive equal to or larger in size than your first drive as a destination drive for recovered files.  The results may not be pretty and still require a lot of hand labeling.
http://data-recovery-software-review.toptenreviews.com/mac-recovery-software

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