External 300G drive wont boot up...

I have an external 300G maxtor firewire drive that was working fine and all of a sudden it does not want to mount and show up on the desktop. a message comes up saying that mac osx can not read disk with the box to check to reinitialize. i have a lot of file files on this drive and this problem is killing me. I do not want to erase everything at the moment. I open disk utility and i see the drive in the list however when i go to check disk an error message comes up as well as when i go to repair disk. i have this drive on a G4 1.25 tower. if anyone has a suggestion as to how to get this drive to munt agin i would be so thankful.
louis
G4 1.25 tower   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

It is a great tool but please do note the "?" in my first reply. I am not sure it can help but it might be worth a shot.

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