Other hard drive now says not formatted

bluep

Very strange happenings...my pc is suddenly running very slow and the task manager shows it flickering up to 90-100% and back down to 2% a lot. All my other hard drives work fine (C: and one other slave) but one hard drive seems to have gone belly up - the pc has problems loading up any properties pages about this hard drive etc... "not responding" being the usual reply, plus its gone from being called MEDIA to E: and now says its not formatted and would I like to format it.

I've done the usual virus scans, got a firewall and good security arrangements, not installed anything new. Surely if the hard drive had just failed, I would have thought it doesn't show up at all, rather than as non-formatted? Last time one failed on me a couple of years ago, it was just dead!

Bit narked as it had 150gb of my stuff on it - mp3s and such like. Any ideas about recovering data from it? Any useful progs that could access it?

Thanks