My partitions seem to disappear...

Okay so I have this weird problem and I'm not sure whats causing it. A couple of months ago, a 60 gb Maxtor harddrive formatted every file that it was holding overnight while my computer was off. Afterwards, the computer detected the hard drive, but it was never detected when i went into Windows Explorer. <-- hopefully that made sense...

Until now, I thought the problem was just my hard drive. So yesterday, same thing happened to a 75 gigabyte partition of my 160 GB Seagate HD. When I start windows, the checkdisk screen comes up, goes to level 3 and just freezes there. And when i skip the checkdisk and go to windows exploerer and try to click on the partition, i get an "The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable" error. If any of this made any sense, does anyone know the reason/solution to recover my files?

 

does it make a difference if the partition that had its files 'disappear' didnt have windows XP installed on it?

 

atm, I have 2 hard drives on my computer. One Western Digital 60GB and one SeaGate SATA 160GB. My seagate has 2 partitions of one 85 and another 75 named as drives D and E, respectively. My WD has only one partition and named drive C. I have Windows XP installed on my C drive. Drives D and E are used for games/storage/etc. Prior to having my files disappear, I was getting the Checkdisk screen for drive E only. It would run everytime I turned my computer on and it would show errors and recoveries of a large number of files. When I check the properties of the E drive, it shows as it having no capacity.