Installing my iMac has erased my external drive! What happened?!

I've just upgraded to a nice new Imac from my ancient G4 Tower. Fired up straight out of the box! Beautiful! What happened to the install disks? I had it humming along in no time. Next I plugged in my Lacie external drive. The Imac recognised it and I was able to use a photo from it for the desktop. The only thing that took a while was the internet connection. The usual story for me with a new computer. Once the internet was up I went to register with Apple and was presented with an urgent "system critical", (or words to that effect), download, that had to be done before I could proceed. No problem I thought. This thing's been sitting in a box for a few months so there are bound to be a few updates. Once the download had finished and installed I noticed that the desktop had returned to factory setting. Hmmm, no problem I thought, I'll set it up again. Only now there is nothing on the external drive? Not a cracker! Checked it with Disk Utility. It said it needed to be repaired so I clicked Repair. Then I checked and repaired permissions. Still nothing on it. Plugged it into the old G4 (yes it's still going) and same thing - nothing there! At no stage did I see any warning about erasing files, let alone entire drives, unless it was buried somewhere in the Agree To terms. Can someone please tell me what has happened? Everything is on that drive!

Spoke to Applecare today and the news is not good. The drive appears to be empty and the best they could do was put me in contact with a Data Retrieval firm where I will get a discount if I mention my Applecare reference!
This external drive has worked faultlessly with a G4 Quicksilver for about 5 years. The imac recognised the files on it, and indeed I was able to use some of the files. After the OS update the external drive was empty!
The Applecare rep said he'd never encountered this before, nor had his supervisor. So at least I'm breaking new ground.
Not impressed.

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Using Disk Utility to Erase an external drive freezes Disk Utility?

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