Maxtor External 500 GB Hard Drive. I had an external drive to keep my music library I had uploaded

Question

I had an external drive to keep my music library I had uploaded to I tunes. The drive is about a year and a half old and no bad management has ever been applied to it. The thing is about two weeks ago my computer(a Sony VAIO Pentium 4 CPU 3.40 GHz 2.29 GHz, 1.00 GB of RAM operating under Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition Version 2002 Service Pack 2) out of nowhere stopped recognizing the external hard drive for unknown reasons. Every time i turned on the drive it makes noises for about 2 minutes (like if it was trying to read the disc) and then stops. Any ideas? Is the data recoverable? Help, please!!!