HDD folders turns into 32kb file

Hello,

This happened last night when my laptop was restarting, and it went into disk check. Usually, I would skip it, but this time I was too late to stop it. So while it was disk checking, my external hard disk was still plugged into my laptop.
And then I found out that some of the folders changed in to an unknown file of 32kb. But the disk memory space is still the same as before, so I assumed my files is probably not lost.
I didn't know what to do then, so I just turned off my laptop, and today I went on google and found that quite a lot of people had similar problems, so I tried some of the methods but none really worked, including using recovery software, it couldn't find the folders.
Then later I found a hidden file named 'Found.000' and inside were 10000 'Filexxxx.chk' files. I have used 'unchk' and 'filechk', which were supposed to recover the files, but didn't.

If anyone knows how I can recover the files, please help me! I know I should've had backups :(