External Harddrive showing Empty but isn't

Before I went to bed last night, I started transferring some of my iPhoto libraries from my MacBook Pro (Oct '09) to an external hard drive. When I woke up this morning to make sure everything had been copied properly, I found the drive unresponsive and I was unable to eject it.
I reboot my laptop and after plugging in my drive, I was horrified to find that the drive was no longer recognizable. I believe the data is still on the drive because it is a 400Gb drive and it says there are only 262GB available.
This drive contains all of my family photos that have been organized. Luckily, I have most (if not all) of the photos backed up on either CD, DVD or another drive. However, they are not organized and I really don't want to have to repeat the organization process which took quite a while...
Does anyone have any ideas how to recover the information on the drive? Since it isn't show any folders at all, I am not sure how to proceed.

I reboot and connected to the first drive (400GB WD My Book) to be sure that absolutely no applications were running. When I tried to copy files from one drive to the other, I got the following error:
The operation can’t be completed because the item “Ellas iPhoto Library” is in use.
If I try to copy an iPhoto library file from the second drive (640GB WD MyBook) to a brand new directory on the same drive, I get a file exists error:
The operation can’t be completed because an item with the name “iPhoto Library - FULL” already exists.
It seems to be hit or miss on copying a file to a new location on drive 2 (640GB) and drive 1 (400GB) is pretty much inaccessible. On the new connection, running disk utility produces a new message:
*Verify and Repair volume “WD - 400GB”*
*Error: Could not unmount disk*
Any operations on the 400GB drive cannot be completed because the "files are in use". Nothing other than FireFox is Running...

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So, I DON'T advice you to give me a solution as "hard reset" unless if you are not sure that this defect will not appear SECOND time after the reset which I deliberately will install hundred of your OVI applications and will put it into ONE GAMES FOLDER just because I CAN without to break any item in the user manual compliant with EU consumer laws.
Please fell free to solve the defect of my product in warranty under EU law terms which is 1 month. All further issues could be arranged by authority of EU consumers protection laws if my party conceive for necessary
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Black_Chevy07 wrote:
I just got a WD My Passport 1TB External Harddrive and i have already backed everything up to it but im still a little nervous about erasing things off the physical drive on my macbook pro since it says my disk utility is out of space an implying i need to erase items.
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External Harddrive showing Empty but isn't

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