Hard drive problem

Ok i have a maxtor 80GB hard drive in my computer. I partioned it into 3 hard drives, 2 20gb and one 36 (was never actually 80gb). It has been working fine for about 2 months now but all of a sudden, last night, while trying to access one of the hard drives, the system started to slow down a lot and it froze on me. Now that hard drive doesnt seem to be accessible even though its there, and being shown in the my computer screen. My primary hard drive, the one with windows xp is in, is still working just fine. So if anyone knows how to fix my problem or at least knows what it is, that would help me out a lot

help me people

See if Maxtor has any drive checking tools you can run. That's the most obvious thing, to see if the drive itself is bad.

Also, are none of the partitions accessible now?

And as an aside, why did you partition it that way to begin with? Other than running seperate OSes on the same machine, I've never seen the point.

also if you right click on My Computer , click manage and click on Drive Manager. You can see the status of the drive and see if it says "Healthy" or if there are any error messages there. Since its a different partition, you can just reformat it and it will probably work again, but you'll loose most of your data.

your drive could be fried.... like they said check maxtor's site for some tools

do you have your data backed up somewhere like on another hd or other media (cd, dvd)?

if so, then just reformat your hd.

also to a previous poster, partitioning hard drives supposedly allows the computer to access data quicker. makes defragging faster. organizes your hd.