Corrupted jpegs

Just bought a ASUS laptop preinstalled with vista home premium.

When the laptop was switched on my external hard drive happened to be on.

The laptop then started to vol check the ext HD . After a while the check
said it had found faulty data .

When I looked at the jpegs with vista on the ext hd a very large number of
my jpegs started to vanish on the screen one after each other to leave a
very small section of the photo at the top with the rest greyed out.

Have tried to recover using some jpeg recovery software but no success#

Any thoughts please

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regards Mike