External hard-drive problem. :-(

Hello.

This problem will probably look very easy to solve (?) ,
to any PC experts reading this.  Admittedly, I'm still very
much a novice .... so ANY advice / information would be
GREATLY appreciated !

I have stored, over the last 18 months, around 440 Gigabytes
of media ( Mpegs, Mp3's etc.. ) onto a Packard Bell 3500
Store & Save external hard-drive.  It had almost reached it's
capacity of 500Gigs.  Now when I plug it into ANY of the USB
ports in my main PC, it takes about 10 minutes to load ( & show
in *my computer*) & it stops ALL other programs from functioning,
whilst doing so.  Once loaded, the files all show ( as they did before )
but when I try to open ANY of them, I get an error message saying
that "windows cannot find the file  H.\\ $Mft. ".  My main PC is XP
Home edition ... although that is probably not relevent as the same
error message & problems occur when I try to access the drive via
any USB on my seperate, brand new lap-top ( windows Vista system ).

I've tried to find problems , about  " $Mft." files (via internet search
engines),
to no avail.
I would hate to lose ALL my data that is on the drive .... is there ANY
way that it can be saved ?  As I said, it does still show up as a list of
files , but NOTHING will open.  Any info. much welcome !

Cheers.

Mr. Blue         :-(
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