Hard drive update

Alright so earlier tonight I did a scan to make sure there were no viruses. I watched it pretty closely and noted that, indeed, all of the files I had saved were still there (as it reads each file name while it scans). Now, however, I have tried to open up the drive and I see that certain files are now listed as "Empty," when there should be over 200 files in there. Oddly, though, the drive itself is at the same exact capacity as it was originally.

Let's say this thing is crashing -- and I'm holding out hope that it's not -- can the photos/documents still be recovered? As I said, there are a lot of items that are only saved on my hard drive.

UPDATE: I am hoping that the fact that the folders are listed as "Empty," while the drive is at regular capacity, is due to the I/O device error. Hopefully the files are there, but not being "read" by the computer. Does that make any sense?