restoring an external hard drive that now has weird file names

[Simon_38]

hello...I have a mybook 2TB external hard drive, and I decided to connect to my tablet, and it said file system unreadable, formatting-i unplugged it right away. I reconnected the hard drive to my laptop and now all the folder names are in weird characters-says all folders now empty but when i right click properties of the drive its still 3/4 full, just like before. help!

 

[popatim]

Do you have another drive to recover these files to?
Basically I would image the drive to another drive.
Recover the files. Preferably from the image
Format the problem drive, test if thoroughly , and then copy the files to it.
Verify the copy worked 100%

Ideally, anything on an external drive should have a backup copy* stored elsewhere. You don't want to be in the position where you realize you just dropped it and probably lost all your precious files.

*at least 1 backup copy... The more copies you have on different devices then the safer those files are.