Awww. I hope everything works out fine.

Pity that CoX messed up your Hard Drive.
That was an awesome game.
It doesn't deserve to do that to your comp. D:

Yeah... and usually it doesn't! I don't know what the heck happened.

yikes! Hope things work out!

It creamed you drive? So it took it out...
Ok. Try this.

Go download malware bytes anti-malware. It's free and it's the best malware remover out there.
Also, go into windows and look for the disk manager. If disk manager can even see the drive, it can be recoverable. If not, reboot, unplug you external drive, turn the computer back on, and plug your drive back in.

PM me your results please. :3

It's nothing to do with malware. As far as I can tell, and as far as a friend of mine believes, I encountered an I/O error that corrupted something in the partition. Every single file in the external drive appeared garbled after the error. I couldn't open folders or anything.

However, after unplugging the external from the computer and power source, I replugged it in and everything worked again. All files opened normally, all folders opened normally. No errors.

I'm currently backing up all my stuff so if next time it's a REAL loss of information, I won't have lost everything like I might have if this had been permanent. But I guarantee you it wasn't malware.

Aw, shit. Well, good luck, I really hope things get better for you!

I'd recommend doing at least 1 backup of all usable software to a dedicated external drive that you normally leave unplugged (except to update the software on it). There's a chance you can recover it if you know more about un-nuking files than I do (GIYF?).

What has happened to you is better than what usually happens to me when I go to partition disks... like the boot one... One of these days I'll learn to put the home directory and such on another partition to make these kinds of upgrades less painful.

Well, that sucks