Cannot open my External Hard Drive

[puritan]

I have 200 GB Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive but I cannot open the drive anymore.  I was doing defragmentation and it froze so I rebooted my computer.  Since then, whenever I double click the drive, the message:
"The disk in drive F is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

pops out and I click no.  Then it says the parameter is incorrect....  It seems like the file inside the drive is still there but I just don't have an access to it.... I might have lost the partition of the drive and I was wondering if anybody knows how to fix it...

I'm running WinXP home.
Thanks

[merlin]

download this and see if it helps >http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm  just a thought which may help plug you drive in and try disk cleanup it might wake it up....

[puritan]

thanks for the help but unfortunately the driver is up to date and I can't reinstall the drive over it.... :'(However, I was searching around the maxtor's page and found this link but i'm not sure if this is the right thing to do.

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=962&p_created=1016493021&p_sid=hQCcRjeh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MTUmcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1zZWFyY2hfbmwmcF9wcm9kX2x2bDE9MyZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMj02OSZwX2NhdF9sdmwxPSZwX2NhdF9sdmwyPSZwX3BhZ2U9MSZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0PXJlc3RvcmUgcGFydGl0aW9u&p_li=

I went to the computer management and checked the info and the drive did not have File System displayed but the status was healthy  I have some where around 90GB of files but the Free space shows that 189.91GB free.  Should I delete the partition and rewrite the partition?  Some web pages suggested to rewrite the partition by using following link's strategy: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q247575"&id=kb;en-us;q247575".  I am not sure if this will not delete my files or not....  to tell the truth, I don't really now what is wrong with my hard drive because this never happened before!  All I can guess is that 1. I accidently erased my partition and trying to format the drive; 2. the hard drive became the virtual drive; 3. the drive is curroped.  I'm also considering about formating my pc and reinstall the OS but I'm afraid that the pc won't recognize the hard drive at all after doing it.  please help! Thanks