[2ndMOUSE02]

Im a musician.
I got a corrupted hard drive about 5 years ago , and lost tracks , sounds , samples , beats everything. I was inconsolable.
I pulled myself together and bought a 320GB western digital ( my book ) so i could backup everything onto it and wouldnt be putting all my eggs in one hard drive , so to speak.

My system is an acer aspire 3200+ running windows vista home basic which came shipped on it. Everything was fine until one day about 2 weeks ago , the sound disappeared ( the windows default sounds and things like winamp and windows media player ) although my music software was still outputting sound through my M-Audio fasttrack pro audio interface and my M-Audio BX5a monitors )

so....i decided that i wanted to do a fresh install of windows vista ( as i was having stuttery playback through my music software too , and needed that clean fresh feeling lol )
I put in the acer " set to factory default configuration " disc , unplugged the hard drive i'm having problems with , and everything went smoothly despite being peeved at the number of restarts it had to do.
I seen the nice clean desktop and felt a new sense of freedom !!

I plugged my hard drive in , where all my songs , sounds , data , photos etc.... are stored , and to my horror , it wasnt showing in " my computer ".
I thought " thats really really strange "........=(
I have a laptop in another room and i decided to unplug the drive and stick it in the laptop as i knew it worked on that ( its running XP ) but when i plugged it in there , it was the same.
I dug furiously in windows help for hours and discovered the " disk management " tool which shows me a display of all the drives. Mine is showing. Its called " samples " which is what i named it. Its also says its online , that its healthy , and that there is still a sizeable chunk of data on it , but there is no drive letter , or drive path.
When i right-click the drive , the only option available to me is " help " , unlike the rest of the drives which have format , partition , assign a drive letter etc.....

Also , what i thought was strange was that when i inserted my drive into the computer after the fresh install of vista , it didnt install the software which was on the drive. Windows detected it and loaded a basic driver , but the inbuilt western digital software didnt run.

Thats all the information i can think of , but i would really appreciate anyones help in gaining access to my data , otherwise ive lost years of work , staying up until 4am often , working on tracks , trying to perfect my art.
where does it end ? do i need to buy a backup to backup the backup of the backup of my backup ?

I am truly truly gutted , and i would totally appreciate the help. Please bear in mind that im in a library and dont really have access to an internet where i can download repair " tools "

oh !! one more thing , i ran the western digital diagnostics tool to check for bad sectors etc....It passed the basic test , and the extended test ( which lasted 3 hours !! )

halp !!

I'm no expert by any means , but in disk management where it shows the disk as healthy and online ( although inaccessible ) , it has a long blue strip along the top of the box that says "unallocated space" and when i click on the rectangle that represents the drive , it is filled with green stripes from right to left.
Is it possible that somehow the partition has been erased ?
Can i use the run command to input some commands to partition it and thus gain access to its contents ?
I just dont understand how its showing as healthy and online , but i cant access it on either my desktop or laptop.

please please please........someone help me out

I have discovered a few more things that may help to solve my hard drive issue , that no-one seems very interested in.....c'mon guys help me out !

The drive does appear in the boot priority list in the PHOENIX bios.
Also , under XP , in disk management , i can see that the hard drive has 205GB free space ( its a 320GB drive ) , but on vista , in disk management , it tells me it has 100% free space.
On both OS , the disk has no drive letter , and there are no options when i right-click , except properties , and help.

Please someone help.....im at my wits end.