Thanks Kingnubian... I ended up checking out that second option you mentioned... and noticed it had this app in it:
TestDisk - CGSecurity
(Perhaps I can even just download that app on it's own and use it?)
(I forgot to mention this, but I just remember the last thing I did before the HDD became "unaccessable", was ran "Scandisk" from vista... is it possible for Scandisk to mess up a HDD? or perhaps my mixture of booting up from different operating systems and different HDD's had it's toll on the secondary HDD's?)