HD SATA 120Gb Maxtor, Broke

My harddrive a Maxtor 120 Gb SATA seems to be broke, This is my secondary HD so it doesn't have windows installed it's only for backup, music etc...

The problem is that most of the time my pc doesn't reconize it and when it does the PC enter windows pretty slow, and when I tried to browse the files.. It crashed windows and I have to restart over and over again until reconigzes...

So should I tried fix it Reformatting the HD (If it let me do it because it crashed windows most of the time) or is this way this HD broke and is already dead..

Help!

Reformatting the drive is not really a "fix"...more of a last ditch desperation strategy, really.
Might as well get the easy stuff out of the way first...
-swap SATA cables between the two drives, leave your backup drive (suspected of being wonky) unplugged and see if the PC boots into Windows properly.

-if it does, reconnect the backup drive (now with a "new" data cable) and see what happens.

-go the Maxtor website and download the SeaTools utility. Follow the directions to make a bootable DOS disk and test the drive.

I don't ever recommend Maxtor. I have owned about 5 Maxtor HDD's in the past. They all died or broke. I highly recommend Western Digital Sata drive or Samsung drive my friend. Good luck hope you get it fixed or a great replacement.