NTFS did stash files away but diskspace is reserved

[MrEko]

Hi!
I have a 1 terrabyte harddrive which I use with NTFS for Mac v7.0.2.
I have many backups on it.
But when I tried to open the harddrive from the Finder my Mac got very slowly and the rainbow spinning wheel appeared.
And very often the harddrive ejected itself. And these days I needed some files very urgent and I didnt want to risk a data lost. So I turned off the Paragon driver and restarted and I read the harddrive with the builtin driver. It did work but many of the files didn't appear in the finder (from about 4000 files just 1000) Then I put on the Paragon driver again. After the restart I didnt see any files in the finder! First I thought they have been deleted but actually the diskspace is still reserved.
After that I restarted with Windows XP and looked for the files. Now I saw some files again but just the 1000 files which I saw with the builtin Mac driver.
So the visible data reserves at the moment about 500 GB. But the harddrive says 700GB is reserved. So I assume that the files are still there.

How can I recover them? I didnt want to use chkdsk because I have made some bad experiences with that. I think this repair tool from Microsoft will just free the space which is now still reserved for the files.
My harddrive is attached over SATA. I have Mac OS X 10.5.7.

Thanks in advance!

[Paragon_Tommy]

Hello MrEko,

To avoid any further damage to your hard drive, I would suggest first using Windows to run scan disk on the volume. It's daunting to see that both Windows and Mac reader not see all 4000 files, which indicates that the fault lies in the hard drive and not the program reading or the operating systems.

With the NTFS drive mounted in Windows, Start > Run > "cmd" "chkdsk X: /r" X being the letter of the drive.

Run repeatedly till no errors are found.