Hdd became unreadable now file system is raw

Hello, all
my hard drive is a western digital 160 gig enhanced ide and has worked flawlessly for two years.
this drive has windows xp OS installed with windows service pack one but its main purpose is storage. it is set to cable select as a slave on the same ide ribbon as my master drive which also has xp OS on it with service pack 3.
three days ago I booted it up into windows for no particular reason and was just poking around.
half an hour later tried to boot it up again and all I got was a black screen with an active cursor so I logged out and didn't think much of it.
the next day I was logged into my master drive moving files from my slave to my master drive in anticipation of doing a fresh install and that's when I noticed file transfers were getting more and more difficult (IE. took minutes to move or delete very small files)
i thought a reboot would help so that's what I did but it turned out to be a disaster!!!
i did a reboot and chkdrive appeared and wanted to check my slave for consistency.
as it was checking my drive is said file record not readable for almost the entire drive. after that was done I clicked properties on my d:\ drive and it said file system was raw-- I almost hit the ceiling because that drive has years of pictures and programs on it.
i have run into this problem months ago not with hard drives but with my backup cd's that I saved files on.
these cd's worked fine for years and all of a sudden poof they suddenly have a file system raw and also are unreadable!
i have tried 3 different CD drives with no luck reading my Cd's
i guess I have two questions to ask.
one is, what are my chances someone can tell how I can recover my pictures and programs from this drive!
and two, why are perfectly good cd's and now my hard drive turning into raw file system?

thankx gene