HELP, external hard drive suddenly "not readable"

Hi everyone,
It appears that my external hard drive that held most of my film material is messed up. It's not being recognized by my mac and the drive was really hot when I touched it.
I have to try to figure this out as on this drive I have 100's of hours of edited material in this one film that I was almost finished with.
Does anyone know anything about this type of stuff, what might of happened and how I might be able to recover the drive?
I'm so lost right now.
It's a 250GB western digital.
when i reboot, the mac sees there is a new drive attached and asks if I want to format the new unformatted drive. To be exact it says:
The drive you inserted was not readable by this computer.
The it provides the following buttons: INITIALIZE - IGNORE - EJECT
Please, any help would be sooooo appreciated.
Jay

Open the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and try using the Repair Disk function on the drive; if it doesn't work, an utility such as TechTool Pro or DiskWarrior may be able to repair the drive. If you have AppleCare for that machine, you have or can get TechTool Deluxe, which can be used for this task.
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