500GB Maxtor One Touch External Drive Crash...

Well, this weekend our 500GB Maxtor External Drive, which is less than 6 months old crashed in such a way as I was getting an error when accessing certain 2nd or 3rd level directories. The error was something like The directory is either corrupted or missing. I ran a check disk on it and it found all of the links to files and directories OK but the data behind it is gone. We have lost a lot of pictures, music and website work. =( This was a sad, sad weekend. I am hoping that I can recover some of what was lost.