Ext. HDD completely & mysteriously BLANK! NEED HELP!

I've never had this happen to me before so I hope somebody can tell me what in the world is going on. This is a long post but please stick with me and help out if you can; alot of information that means the world to me is gone. Heres the deal:

I have a 120GB Maxtor One Touch External Hard Drive that I've had for a few years now, its labeled as "Local Disc (G)". I don't use it very often...primarily for backup only. I had about 90GB of space used up on it. It was just just fine a couple weeks ago when I used it last but I got on my computer today, turned on the drive like normal, went to "My Computer" to open it up... When the window opens it is COMPLETELY blank....not a thing on it!

I go into the properties of the drive and the "File System" says RAW! It also reads zero's across the boards...."Free Space", "Used Space", "Capacity"....everything zero! From there I went to "Disk Management" to see what was going on. Its not registered as a volume at all....no where to be found. It has a letter assigned to it when viewing it in "My Computer" like you would normally expect but its not in "Disk Management"....I didn't think this was possible, but apparently I'm wrong.

Then I unplugged it from the USB port, plugged it back in and turned the drive on. Windows wouldn't recognize it ANYWHERE now?!?! I went into "Device Manager", looked under the USB controllers and it said "Unknown Device". Looked at the properties of that and it said there was no drivers installed. So, I deleted the "Unknown Device", unplugged the drive, plugged it back in and now I am back at square one. Shows up in "My Computer" but not in "Disk Management" and still blank as hell.

I have no idea what to do....I want this data if there is any possible way at all to recover it. Long post I know but I would really appreciate some help with recovering some information that means a whole lot to me. Thanks.

 

Forgot one thing...since my computer is saying that there are no drivers installed anymore, does this mean I should go ahead and reinstall the driver? Or should I just leave it be until someone smarter then me tells me what to do?

 

Thanks...ya I tried that for a little bit but quickly got discouraged. I am not sure which option/method to select since I don't even know whats wrong or what happened to the drive. I tried to play around with a few things but was unsuccessful...if anyone has any advice for me on how to use this program properly, I am all ears.

 

Thank ya sir...I'll give it a try.