how can i recover an external hard drive that has blanked out?

I recently lost my data on an external 80gb hard drive (Maxtor). I have windows XP and a friend of mine told me that i can either recover the hard drive or reformat it and have a new hard drive with all the old data lost. I seen on your web site how to reformat it but i want to know how to recover before i do that. Thank you for your time.