Cannot access my second hard drive in XP

I just noticed that my second hard drive dissapeared from my computer, i decided to restart the pc hoping it would reappear, it did, however i still can't access it when i try to open it i get the following message: H:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadeable. BIOS still sees it, when i restart the PC, it lists both of my hard drives and both optical drives, but i can't open it in Windows.

This was preceeded by somewhat strange behavior this morning, my PC would not boot into XP and would freeze after the Windows is loading message, i had to restart several times by pushing the restart button to log on. It was somewhat slow at first but after the next restart was back to normal, and then i noticed the missing second HD. I don't even know if its a hardware or a software issue. Can someone help me with this?