External hard drive, restore problem! Files are gone...?

All the files are gone... but the folders are still there.
Here is what happened:
Step 1
I restored everything from main HD (two disk striped RAID) to external hard disk (Western Digital MyBook 1TB ). The external disk was mac formated (Mac OS Extended - Journaled). Everything went just fine.
Step 2
I boot the computer from the exernal drive. That also went just fine.
Step 3
I create a new bigger RAID set from 4 internal disks.
Step 4
Restoring then from external drive (now the boot volume) to the new internal RAID set went horribly wrong! Restoration had stopped at some point during the night and resulted weird issues.
Trying to boot the machine didn't work...
Trying to boot from external drive didn't work...
Trying to boot with option key down I got an HD icon called "EFI boot") which did not work...
So, I connected the external drive to a different mac (also leopard 10.5.7) and all the restored files copied in step 1 were gone! All the folders were still in place but files like images and stuff totally gone. Get info from the drive gives also around 930 Gb of free space... So they don't waste any space either.
What happened? How can I get my files back? Somehow I don't think they are deleted for good...
I already tried repairing with Disk utility and Disk Warrior and installing the latest drivers from WD website...
PS. Sorry for the language issues. English is not the native one for me...

I've used time machine in the past and couldn't get to the bottom of the problem so I've recently downloaded and am using carbon copy cloner and I get the same problem. The files that are missing are just word and number documents. Seems so odd.
Thanks for replying
John

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External hard drive, restore problem! Files are gone...?

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