Lost forever

I installed windows 7 on my laptop because it kept braking and being slow, so I put my work on my external hardrive 250gb one, at the same time I was clearing my pc of work because i was going to fromat my hardrive and clean it up because it has been running slow playing games recently, when I finished doing all the installing and cleaning I then plugged in my external hardrive to only get a message saying it cannot be read and needs to be re-formated .... I knew that I couldnt because then I would loose all my work, pictures and music that i put on there while I was cleaning my pc and laptop, knowing that I didnt have a copy of any of the things that I just put on it I started to worry then search high and low for answers only to find that my external hardrive has only ever been working on my pc since I last formated it from FAT32 to NTFS didnt realise that I hadnt unplugged it since then and aparently it didnt format it proply and would only ever work on my pc since it knew information about it other machines didnt because it was the machine to format it, so when I unplugged it and put it in my laptop and i got the error message it broke .... This ment that the only way to fix it was to format it and loose all the files I had on it =[

glad it didnt happen on a deadline day or while I was doing work, im normally a safe person and have at least 3 copies of work, just so happend that I put all those 3 copies onto the same hardrive while i was cleaning the other ones, lost 80% of my first year at uni :\ OWELL