Primary Master Hard Disk Fail (Maxtor 40GB)

I have a Maxtor 40GB HD as my primary drive and a WD 160GB as my secondary. I was using my computer a few hours ago just fine and all of a sudden it locked up on me with the computer led light blinking like crazy (motherboard is an Asus A7N8X Deluxe). After waiting a few moments, i decided to shut the pc off. After turning it back on, i get the message Primary Master Hard Disk Fail. Both drives are IDE and i also have an NEC dvd-rw and an LG dvd drive connected. The NEC and LG drives were detected just fine, as was the WD HD. The Maxtor was detected as: Maxtor N40P NAR6159Z.
After doing some searching on this, I found out that the drive may not necessarily be dead (thankfully--because all i need from it are a few important documents). However, I'm not the brightest when it comes to configuring things in the BIOS or using a bunch of recovery tools. Can anyone please help me??

I also have this link if it helps: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/bios-co...r-hard-disk.htm

 

After more hours of research, i've read many mention that the firmware could be corrupt and that it may work to somehow reconfigure the firmware. Anyone know how to do that? I tried Seatools but I don't see an option to fix the firmware.