Reformated external hard disk still shows files and folders

Hello.
I recently bought an external hard drive, which I'm connecting by eSATA through the ExpressCard slot in my (now last-generation) 15-inch MBP, late 2008. I began getting disk errors and disk utility told me to reformat the drive. I reformatted it (as HFS, unjournaled) using through Disk Utility using the "write zeros" option, which took about 4 hours. What puzzles me is that Disk Utility still shows that there 9 folders and 16 files on the disk, with about 160 MB of space used. If I verify the disk, these numbers increase. Each time I erase the disk, they go back down to 9 folders, 16 files. Of course, in Finder, the disk shows 0 items.
Can anyone explain to me why this is happening? Should it be this way, or is something wrong here? I am still getting "keys out of order" errors even after this reformat.
Thank you

It sounds like it never gets to the stage of actually erasing any data. This may indicate a directory problem with the drive*:
http://www.macmaps.com/directoryfaq.html
Which could also mean something is wrong with the drive itself.
So if after repairing the directory, you still can't format the drive, I would assume that your drive is faulty, or the format you are choosing doesn't work well in your operating system.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

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Hi. I'm really in a panic right now because school starts tomorrow and a problem occurred with my external hard drive today. Before I start, I would like to clarify that I use a Macbook Pro 15" (not Retina Display). Here is what happened:
Around 6 months ago, I was organizing the contents of my external hard drive into folders (i.e. "Movies" > "Romance," "Action," "Horror," etc.). In the midst of doing so, my laptop kind of froze and before I knew what was happening, the contents of the "Movies" folder was invisible. The "Movies" folder itself was still visible and accessible, but its contents were not. When I double-clicked the "Movies" folder, nothing would be shown. It was as if it was empty. The problem is that something was still taking up space on my external hard disk. When my friends asked to copy some of my movies onto their computers, I agreed and saw that they could access the "Movies" folder on their Mac laptops! This means that it was probably a problem with my Mac laptop. I decided to ignore it because I was still able to access the contents of the folder if I plugged in my external hard drive into my TV (it's an LG TV).
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Do you see how annoying this is?! It clearly states that there is only 17.78 GB left on the external hard drive meaning that there are a LOT of files on this hard drive considering its capacity is 1 TB, but I can't access or see anything inside the external hard drive! I tried to open my hard drive on my brother's Alienware (Windows 7), but it couldn't open it because its format. I also tried plugging it into my LG TV and the only folder visible is the "found.000" folder and I can't access it.
Please give me some advice as to what I can do as soon as possible. I am willing to go to a store to fix it, but I would much rather try to do it myself at home. I transferred all my movies from my laptop to this external hard drive because I had no more space on my laptop (yes, almost 90% of the space taken up on my external hard drive is used up by movies and episodes).
Please help me. I also have school files on here (granted, they are from two years ago, but you never know when you're going to use them). I'm a HUGE movie junkie and I've downloaded so many movies that I don't even remember what I downloaded last week (I just can't keep track of which ones I've downloaded when).
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The problem is caused by the third-party software you installed in order to make NTFS volumes writable. Refer to the developer for support. You might be able to repair the volume in Windows using the CHKDSK program.

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Hello,
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Then why aren't you posting this in the Windows 8 forums found @
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Reformated external hard disk still shows files and folders

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