Help! I think I crashed an external drive!

I have a SeaGate external drive (80gb) and I was using it on a Mac OS X iBook laptop after my Windows hard drive crashed. So I accidentally forgot to "safely" remove the drive before I unplugged it - because I'm so used to PC's where you don't have mess with such stupid nonsense.
Ever since then, I can no longer access any files on the drive. When I plug it into a Mac, it doesn't even notice it. When I plug it into my new MS Vista desktop computer that I just bought last night, it wants me to format the disk. But of course, if I format it, I lose everything, and that is BAD!
Is there anyway to go in and change some setting somewhere to allow the disk to open again without formatting it?
Please tell me there's a simple fix here!

Open the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and run the Repair Disk command on that drive. If the Disk Utility doesn't succeed, software such as DiskWarrior might.
(24981)

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