Did I just lose a bunch of my data?

Don't touch that drive. Just obtain a copy of GetDataBack and there's a good chance you'll recover all of the data.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Hotobu

Still the drive is about 4 or 5 years old. The question is what to do with it now? I don't want to just discard a working 200 Gig HD... but it probably is in the twilight of it's life. Any suggestions?

Just reformat it (or use some sort of partition recovery software if you want) and keep it for non-critical data. I've had a HD fail this way two years ago, it's still operational.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management

See if you can find it there.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.