unreadable drive / bad partition?

[Sherwin]

Having problems with an external USB drive. Getting the "File or
directory is corrupted and unreadable" message...

-I have tried connecting it to other computers with same message.
-installed drive internally which did not fix the problem (rules out
hardware/mechanical failure as well).

i'm thinking it may be a problem with the partition, tried to use
several apps but none seem to work. ran CHKDSK /F and it says unable
to determine volume version and state.

disk manager shows the drive as "healthy" and 100% free. i would like
to recover data on the drive, some of the files are too large to
transfer over via data recovery tools (roughly 125 gigs of files) and
i dont have a spare drive large enough.

is there any way to rebuild the partition successfully while
maintaining as much of the directory structure / files as possible?
any help is greatly appreciated!