It's gonna take a long time to breathe this one!
Earlier today I plugged my 1TB My Passport external hard drive (you know, the one where I back up all my files) into this Raspberry Pi to look at my Pictures folder. But it was taking too long and giving me the funky hourglass cursor, so I decided to close the window. It did not respond at first, even when I gave it the command to force a quit, so I unplugged the drive, whereupon I was advised by the computer that it's not a good idea to disconnect a drive before ejecting it. So I then connected it to my laptop, only to have trouble accessing the Pictures folder. It said the folder was not accessible, and under Properties it said 0 files, 0 bytes!
I was terrified I had lost all my pictures, all hose years' worth of work down the drain! I can't express how scared and awful I felt. But then, I remembered something that gave me hope: Ever since I've owned this drive, it always gave me a small popup saying there were errors in the drive and advising me to scan now for errors. Hoping against hope that that would repair the drive and make the folder accessible again, I scanned it and left for the convenience store around the corner to see if my lottery tickets won anything (and also to get my mind off my problems for the time being). When I got home, I was even happier and more relieved than I would have been had I won the lottery, because the drive was fixed, and now my Pictures folder is still all there and fully accessible! Yay! I'm so relieved!