Hard drive format problem

I can't access a slave drive i've been using for about 3 years now. I use it for file storage. I've made no changes, but when i try to access it, i get the massage - the disk is not formatted. Format it now? It was working fine yesterday, but if i format it i'll lose my files. I've run an antivirus scan, spybot, registry checker, still no joy

This might seem redundant...but try accessing a known folder on the drive directly.
eg. START>>RUN, Type "D:\Games\"

there are other things to try, but this has happend to me before and I couldn't fix it, but at leased I could backup everything in the folders I could access this way.

And if this works...it eliminates lots of other reasons.

Cheers