Partition Table

I have a 200g externial hard, and I partition it into 3 sections months ago.
Today I was looking at some files on one of the partitions and all of a sudden the drive I was examining sort of vanished. The other two drives appear fine, but this one lost its volume name and no data appears to be there. No deleting or formatting has done, but I think the partition table somehow got corrupted.
I am running XP. Any advise on how to recover this drive.

 

Can you still see the drive in "my computer"?

 

Yes, but the volume name changed to local drive,and it claims to be unformatted

 

Weird, have you scanned for a bug? The driver can screw up a partion, and if it's the primary one, it it might take out the rest, but i'm not sure. Only thing i can come up with is virus, drive malfunctioning (driver or mechanical),loose wire in the USB circuit somewhere, or kids. Try a virus scan, then reformat and treat it as a suspect drive for a while. If It does lose the formatting again, then i would think strongly of the malfunctioning drive, or virus or loose wire options. If the others go down then it has to be a virus.

Can't think of any other reason.