Seagate Barracuda 160 GB IDE becomes corrupted. RMA?

Part number: ST3160023A-RK

Bought 08/13/2004 online at outpost.com, and it still has almost 4 years
on the warranty. I've never lost a HD before, although I RMA'd one that
was getting bad sectors 6 months after purchase. I've had over 10 HDD's.
This was working perfectly, AFAIK and suddenly a couple of days ago
Windows 2000 doesn't see the drive (Explorer). Disk Management shows it
online but unformatted. So, I suppose the partition table became
corrupted. Is this an automatic RMA? Can it be assumed that it's a
hardware issue? Is it possible for me to retrieve the data somehow? Or
is that an expensive and/or iffy proposition? Of the 3 HDD's in the
system, this was the most expendable in terms of the data. In that I was
extremely lucky. I used it mainly for backup and temporary work.

Thanks for any info.

Dan