Windows Cannot Read Passport Drive/Files Gone! Please Help

I was actually in the process of moving my from one passport to another.  In doing so, I had some corrupted files, so I thought I would run “CHKDSK”  on the drive.   This is exactly what I did …

1)  I opened the command prompt and started “CHKDSK”.   

  1. I got a question asking me if it could unmount the drive in order to perform the chkdsk operations.

3) I said “yes” (now wondering if that was a mistake).

  1. As it was doing its thing, it is printing the line that “file record segment ## is unreadable”

  2. My point was to let it finish, but I inadvertently stopped it (I didn’t mean to).

6) I tried accessing the files and they were all gone.   WD Smartware shows 0 capacity and 0 kb used.

I looked around and am now running “Easy US Data Recovery Wizard Professional”.    I don’t know if anyone is familiar with the software, but I started the recovery and it is in “intelligent searching mode”, and the remaining time it states is 187+ hours.   I don’t know if it will actually take that long.  The good part is that the software says it found 797 files

If anyone can lend any insight as to what happened, and if it was something that I did (as described above) to cause this.   Also, please let me know if I am on the right track as to what I’m doing to correct this.   And finally, if there is something that would be more effective, that would be great as well.

I know some advice will probably be to back up that passport drive.  As I mentioned before, I was in the process of moving my data to a new drive when this happened.

Of course all comments and help are very much appreciated.

Thanks to all in advance.

Yup, most data recovery programs will show a big number to finish, but in most cases it never takes that that long.