External Hard Drive Partially Recognized

I looked around the forum, but have not found an answer...
I've an external hard drive, which I've been using for a while with no problem until today. The HD was partitioned into 2 sections. Today, when I turned it on, my mac only recognized one of the partitions. I ran the disc utility to try to verify & repair the partition, but I got the following error:
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit.
Since part of the HD is recognizable, I guess I can assume that it is not totally fried. How can I fix this??

I think it may be OK then, just check the S.M.A.R.T. status in System Profiler>Hardware>Serial ATA.
After you recover or backup all your info...
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc that came with your computer, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
3. Click the Erase tab.
4. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the hard drive icon to display the names of your hard disk volumes and partitions.
5. Select your Mac OS X volume.
6. Highlight the drive, select Erase Tab, then Format type... MacOS Extended Journalled, select the Security Options button, choose Zero Out Data, Erase... after completion hopefully you'll be able to install.

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