USB HDD decided to stop working

[Pyromidion]

I have a USB enclosure that had a 300gb maxtor HDD in it. I only ever had it on when i was watching videos (most of what was there), or copying files. Tonight, I was going to copy some files to it and powered it on; Windows found the USB device (as normal), but couldnt access the drive saying that the file system is corrupt. disk management (win xp) saw that it was 279gb (or something like that, which i understand to be normal due to formatting and such), but didnt see a file system on it at all.

From Computer management -> system event viewer, there are a number of errors from the source "NTFS" / Catagory "Disk" with the message "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. please run the chkdsk utility on the volume (I" (I: is my usb drive)

I took it out of its enclosure, and tried to move it to an internal spot on my secondary master IDE. Windows now sees the drive as a 128gb HDD, with no file system, and unformatted.

Question is, is there any way to recover my data from something like this?

 

[Pyromidion]

bump! I think that the data is still there (more like "i hope...") its just the file system right? is there any software that can get the data even though windows doesnt see a file system?

edit: i was lying in bed last night, and I was thinking....one of the last things i did with that drive was a defragmentation. Of my HDDs, 3 of them are fat32, and the one here is my only NTFS. would that be the cause?, or am I just thinking too hard about this?

-John