My external hard drive just ate my photos

Hi, my hard drive is partitioned in two, and on one partition, it keep all my photos, and in this partition, all the photos werer in kessy files, with names like dcim china, dcim flight, dcim london, etc, and to make things neater, i made a folder called photos and dragged and dropped all my pictures into it, and i made another file called, with the aim of calling it 'other' to put the rest of my files in. However, before I could rename it, the computer renamed the file 'pictures'. Now i had two fiile, both identical, containing the same files. then, i closed the window, and reopened it, in an attept to make the computer see sense, but then the folders had emptied themselves.

My partition says it has 28gb left, on a 150gb partion, but contains only 60gb of data. How do I get my data back? I have tried validating and repairing, and a restart.

I just tried creating new flders with names identical to those that had been moved, to no avail. The computer treats the names wierdly, renaming a nearby folder to the same name, so I have more dulplicate, identical folders, but now empty.

how do i do that

Ok, I dropped $100 on Data Rescue II, and it found all my photos and other things, but they lost all the names and edits in Aperture. Still, images, no matter how badly organised, are better than no images.
Thanks for the tip aricher