External Hard Drive not appearing on my desktop...

I am encountering a major problem with my Maxtor external hard drive. I have had the drive a few weeks, and everything has been sweet, swwet enough for me to trust it enough to back up 10 years of professional work and irreplacable photos. Today however it has decided to not show up on my desktop, and instead give me the option of initialising it, ejecting it and ignoring because 'my computer can not read it'!!!
I have tried disk utility but get get end of messages and am unable to repair the disk eeven though it says it needs fixing.
My next step has been to download TechTool, which seems to be sticking a 3rd of the way through a disk surface test?
I am pretty desperate as I REALLY don't want to loose what I have on it, so any light anybody can shed would be HUGELY appreciately.
Thanks in advance
s

Some people recommend erasing a drive (write zeros) before using which may pick up and mapout most bad blocks. Then benchmark the drive over various areas with something like intech speedtools QuickBench 3 and Zone Bench.
I like to load some test data to fill the drive to 90% and then erase and start using. but always keep two backups, one of which is off-line so if something happens you still have the alternate, as a minimum.
Are you using TTPro 4.12? there were problems with earlier versions and FW, and, FW is not immune from problems itself, as each OS X upgrade has attested, and updates to Oxford 911/912/922 chipset.
Also, you would not be alone in having trouble with Maxtor One-Touch. A search on http://www.macintouch.com for one, yields some hits. Another good place to look would be
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com
you can also good for Diamond Max 10/11 or Maxline III.
While you can access the data, backup. Maybe look into external SATA, or build your own FW800 912/922/924 drive and case.
I'm no longer a big fan of 3rd party tools, but Disk Warrior is good to have on hand.
And never, ever, fill a drive beyond 80-85%. After 75% you start to lose performance and high fragmentation can be a problem.

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