Sometimes you can sometimes you can not. The least expensive way to try is to put the hard drive into a usb enclose and see if you can read the drive. You could also send the drive out to companies that will do hard drive recovery (Click here for an example)

The message you are getting is from SMART, which is the software integrated into the drive. It is essentially telling your system that it can't read the drive. Here are a few reasons why this may have happened:

1. Drive not enabled in BIOS
2. Serial (SATA) or Parallel (PATA) drivers are not properly installed
3. Faulty or unplugged data cable. (They rarely go bad, but you should still
check it).
4. Drive is not spinning up. Check that it is still getting power. If so, can you
feel or even hear it spinning at boot?
5. Incorrect jumper settings on drive. Probably not a concern, unless you've
changed anything, or added another drive.
6. The drive is faulty (ie, dead).

If it is not 1 thru 5, then you are left with the grim prospect of # 6. If it is under warranty, send it back to Maxtor (go to www.seagate.com for return instructions). You will usually lose your data when you return it to the factory, as they will swap out the drive for another and send you the new one.

As far as your data is concerned, if the drive is dead, your data is history. If it is highly valuable data, you might have the drive repaired - there are local shops who can do it, or at least recover the data from it, but the service is typically very expensive (a recent customer lost their client files on a 120gb drive, and the recovery cost was over a thousand dollars).

Hopefully, you backed up your data onto CD-ROM or DVD. If you didn't, it is something you will want to start doing in the future, at least weekly, if not daily.

Sorry I can't give you better news. On the plus side, if you can't get it working again and it truly is dead, new drives are very cheap, these days.

Cheers,
Nick