BleepingComputer.com: internal HDD has disappeared from 'my computer'

Hello

I have a Windows XP computer with two hard drives, both Maxtor. While the system drive seems fine, the slave drive has disappeared from 'My Computer' - This drive is a Maxtor 6B160P0. The drive is almost completely full with files of various sorts, meaning I have used it extensively for a few years with no difficulty. Restarting the computer doesnt not cause the hard drive to reappear. It does appear during the boot process and it also appears in device manager and also Disk Manager under the admin tools. In disk manager it appears as disk 1 with a red circle and it says it is not initialized and that the 152.66 GB of the hard drive are unallocated. Some sort of wizard comes up asking to initialize the disk, but I canceled that as I would like to recover my data and if at all possible, use the disk again (I do have a back up of the data on an external hard drive but it got knocked off the desk and the USB port broke, so I need to get a new case and I'm not 100% certain that the external hard drive was not damaged - I dont think it was, but I'd rather not give up on the data on my internal drive until I'm sure it is backed up). I have run virus checkers (avast, adaware and spy-bot) and none of them found anything

I guess my biggest question besides 'how do I fix it?' is 'how did this problem arise in the first place?'

Any help would be appreciated - I'm not computer illiterate, but a lot of the technical troubleshooting eludes me - I will try to provide any further information asked for

Thanks

Mike

PuppyLinux - there is a boot CD available that has drivers for most drive interfaces and can allow file recovery from drives that Windows has problems with.
Do not do try this until you have a reliable storage device to save the data on.
http://puppylinux.com/

Test Disk can repair partition problems, it is not easy to use until you have done so four or five times, read the directions (twice).
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

ok

thanks for the suggestion - I will try to get my storage situation taken care of as quickly as possible - I don't know if it matters, but I only have a single partition on the problem hard drive - does that still mean it is probably a partition problem and also, any idea how that could have occured (I was about to say I havent added any software, but I do use Mozilla firefox as a browser and it had just completed an update)

anyway - I really appreciate your input

Mike