Did chk dsk on Maxtor OneTouch 4 and it deleted folders that were corrupt?

I have a Maxtor OneTouch 4 external hard drive and it's driving me crazy. I have my iTunes library in it organized in subfolders. A few of the folders were corrupt and unreadable so I ran a chk dsk and that fixed it but then a couple of days later, I couldn't get into them again - system said that they were corrupt and unreadable. So I ran chk dsk /f /r again and this time the actual folders that were having problems have all disappeared. How I can get them back? I also lost some folders that had photos in them. Help!