Moving folders in Lightroom - lost all my pictures!

Hi,
I'm hoping someone can help me recover my files, although something tells me they are gone for good.
I keep my lightroom catalog and files in my external hard drive, but my HD is old and it was getting full, so I bought a new one to split my work and personal files.
I started by moving my work lightroom catalog, which went fine. Next step was to move my work folders from the old HD to the new HD. I thought the best way to do this was through lightroom, so as to avoid the 'missing file' problem. I have my folders organised by year, so I started with my 2012 folder, containing thousands of pictures from that year. I simply dragged the 2012 folder from the old HD to the new HD and waited (a very long time) for the move to finish.
When it finished, it came up with an error message saying some files couldn't be moved, and listed the files that couldn't be moved. It seemed like a lot of files, and they were grouped as 1-100, 101-200, 201-300, etc. So I clicked on the 2012 folder and all the sub-folders were there, named correctly, but they were empty. I then went to Finder on my Macbook to look for the files and the 2012 sub-folders were empty!
The 2012 folder and its sub-folders are present on both the old and the new HDs, but all my pictures are gone from both HDs.
I have no idea how this happened and what I can do to fix this. How can Lightroom delete my pictures when all I was doing was moving them to a new HD? And why did it move the folders and sub-folders correctly, but the pictures are gone? Any help will be much appreciated!
All I know is I'm NEVER moving folders inside Lightroom again!
Thanks!

Hello,
did you look in the trashcan? LR normally move images to the trashcan.
You can try some recovery program and try to rescue some images. I like PhotoRec but there may better (comercial) programs. After recovery you may try to relink the lightroom catalog to the files in your filesystem. I wrote an article in my blog how to do so in my blog for an other forum post. May be this may help you to loose not all of you images (in case you do not have a backup - but we all have ).

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