Spinning wheel of death and external hard drive crashes

Hi,

I am hoping that someone will help me before I completely lose faith in macs and just stick with the PC. I opened up my macbook (it had not been shut down properly, only closed with the desktop visible) and had connected my Seagate 250G external hard drive through the USB port. The spinning wheel of death was doing its stuff for a while so I decided to turn off the External drive. Since the macbook had not recognised the drive yet (icon had not appeared) I had presumed that it was OK to just switch off rather than formally ejecting since there was nothing to eject. I rebooted and now it say that the disk inserted cannot be recognised and should be reformatted (which I did not agree to). When I go to disk utility, the drive is greyed out so that I cannot verify or repair. I have since connected to two other computers who also do not recognise drive (one a PC) and ask to reformat. IS THERE ANY WAY I CAN SALVAGE THE INFORMATION ON THE EXTERNAL DRIVE ??????? Also, is there a disk drive that is recommended that is not so sensitive to macs? I have lost 170G of information. Please help.....