Vista - Data Reovery

My Maxtor One Touch 4 external hard drive is acting up. I'm getting an error message from the Maxtor software that there is no partition or that the partition is not recognized and is telling me to format the drive. I do not want to do this yet because I do not want to lose my data.

I've been looking at some data recovery programs to try to recover the data. When I first downloaded the recovery program, it saw the hard drive but then I had to pay to recover the data. So then I downloaded a free data recover program and now I can not get the hard drive to show up...on neither of the recovery programs.

It does not show up in My Computer, but does show up in Device Manager. Any ideas how I can get this to show up in my computer again or to show up on a "drive search" in one of the recovery programs? I really do not want to pay the expensive fees to have a "professional" recovery service do it.

Vista has a disk manager built in.
Go to your start menu then Administrative Tools & Computer Management
then click on Disk Management and you can see all of your hard drives.

On a recovery tool I dont think I'm going to be much help, sorry

Yep, I have been to the Disk Management as well. It shows up in there but there is no partition shown and I do not want to format and lose my data.

Gbnt is one of the best software which i use

I actually just downloaded that a few minutes ago. It is not showing up in that program when I search for available drives. But again, it does still show up in Device Manager and Disk Management. But it is not showing up in My Computer or any Data Recovery program I install.