external hard drive problem

I've got a problem with my Maxtor 3100 external hard drive. There are several things going on and I'm not sure what is connected to what so I'm just going to tell everything.
I recently bought the 80 GB Maxtor because my Dell only has a 4 GB internal drive and it is getting close to being full. I had upgraded from Windows 98 to XP SP1 several months ago and it filled up my C drive quickly! So I buy the Maxtor drive, open the box and plug it in just like the pictures show. Things seem fine. When I go to 'My Computer' it now shows both hard drives. When I go to disk management it shows both as well. I have Money 2005 on my C drive (internal) and I saved a backup of it to my E (Maxtor external). Then I had the brilliant idea to move Money from C to E to save space on my C drive. This is where it all goes down the drain. I did something wrong and I lost the Money file I was working on so I tried to restore from the backup on the E drive. Money said it couldn't find it on E or C. While trying to find out what was going on I, at some point, rebooted. At this point the computer couldn't find the Maxtor drive at all. It wasn't under 'my computer' or disk management. I can unplug the drive and it will then show up under 'my computer' but still not under disk management. So now not only have I lost Money I've also lost my external drive. I called Maxtor and they suggested converting both drives to NTFS from FAT32. I was able to convert the C drive but not the Maxtor. I am so lost at this point I don't know what to do next. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

so your saying that you can't access your 2nd h/d at all? if that's the case i'd try and see if i can access it (external drive) with some data recovery software, get what you can off of there, and then reformat it.

what about trying to connect it to a friends/relatives computer, and see if you can access it?

this is only my opinion, and i'm sure someone will come behind me and say something if i'm wrong!!

http://www.pcinspector.de/download.asp?language=1#file_recovery <-- this one i've used

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=58213&highlight=data+recovery <-- thread here (i kept), but i couldn't figure out the software

anyway, i wouldn't do anything real quick (like formatting, etc.), until you get what you can off of there, and/or someone else has any other ideas!! - sos