External hard drive crash. Can this be recovered?

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware (More info?)

Hi, I have had a Western Digital 120 GB external firewire drive hooked to my
Win XP Pro PC for about 3 years (FAT formatted). All relatively fine until
yesterday. Recently, I only had about 3 GB left, so I started copying and
removing data to a DVD burner I just bought, and I had 15 GB free as of
yesterday. All of a sudden, my PC started hanging up. I rebooted, disk check
came up and said something about errors on certain files and that they would
be converted to file or something. Again everything froze up. I was ready to
do some heavy duty data copying to DVD, but my PC was hanging up too much. I
had to start doing "hard" reboots. On a subsequent reboot, the disk check
said it was "removing everything after the \", or something to that effect,
on my external drive. It happened so quick. When Windows started, I checked
my D (external) drive, and for sure it said there were no folders or files
at all. However when I go into Properties for that drive, it says I used 97
GB and have 15 GB free, so there is still something on there. I also tried
to save a small amount of data, and the drive seems to be working. However I
don't want to put any more on there yet, so it don't start overwriting stuff
that I can hopefully recover. What is my best way to go about recovering the
stuff on this drive? Anything I can do from my PC or will I need to take the
drive to a pro? How bad does it sound? Thanks in advance.