External HD Probelm! Help!

Alright, so about five months ago I bought a Maxtor 300 gb fire wire/usb external hard drive. It was working perfectly until the other day, it just seemed to crash. Everytime I tried to turn it on, I got an error message saying that the device was not readable by this computer. Well maxtor support is closed till tuesday, but after reading many horror storis online, I've come to the realization that the hard drive is dead. Now my biggest fear is that I lost everything on the drive. I have extremely important fils on that drive that include many video projects from the last few years. I need to recover these files!! I've checked out a few recovery programs, but a lot of them require a windows interface, I am running one right now, but I don't think it will produce any resuls. Can anyone help me? Does anyone know of any other disk recovery software for mac osx that works well? Thanks in advanced.

If you have a data recovery place by you like data doctors they should be able to help you out and get stuff off a broken HD but it will cost $$$$. what kind of HD error is it? does the HD spin up? have you tried to run disk utility on it to check and see what error it is?

This is why you should always have a backup...for your backup....