Seagate hard drive gone...

I've got Win XP, and bought an additional internal 350GB hd from Seagate. I've had absolutely no problems with it so far.

I woke up this morning, and my computer was acting uncharacteristically slow, so I rebooted. It took several times to reboot in order to get to the password screen, it would just take exceptionally long to go through the waiting screen, on safe mode, regular mode, etc.

I finally was able to get on, and I opened a folder which is a shortcut to my Seagate for music, but I got a pop up from Windows claiming "The drive or network connection that the shortcut 'Music.lnk' refers to is unavailable. Make sure the disk is properly inserted or the network resource is available, and then try again'

I've tried going into My Computer, the drive isn't there, nor does it appear when I right click, under manage...

There's been no physical trauma, movement, or anything to my tower. Could it possibly be a virus? I've used uTorrent for a while, but never had any issues with corrupt files (that I know of), and a full scan with AVG hasn't turned anything up.

Any thing I can do to get back my hard drive? I appreciate it