Help, is my hard drive f*cked?

Big problem here

i got a new external firewire drive to save my audio stuff on to, when i turned on the pc tonight and went to open a recent project i got the message

G:\ is not accessible
the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable

the same message comes up every way i try to get into my external drive.

I dont really want to format the disk but i dont know of any way rounds this.

Does anyone know why this has happened and how i can avoid it in the future and most importantly can it be fixed without reformating

HELP

Panic over

used a data recovery programe and i have got all my files back.

it has remaned some of the directories but everthing is still there

just formated the external drive and it seems to be working grand now :dance: