Recovering an uninitialized NTFS hard disk

I booted from my XP SP2 CD to try and perform scandisk on a drive. (I
couldn't defrag it because there was some problem or other which
Windows suggested I run scandisk to fix). The PC loaded up the
drivers etc, but then the PC rebooted. Great. Even better, now, my
other 300gb drive is showing as "not initialized" and "unallocated" in
the Computer Management tool. This has happened before, and I fixed
it by initializing it, then running some freeware app to recover
files, which it sort of did, although it couldn't get everything back,
but it was mostly ok. I have no idea why this happens. It doesn't
seem to be something which I can find references to on the net. My
PC is ok apart from this, and I have no idea why it happens. I have
two physical drives. One is partitioned as C: and D:, which are fine,
and the other is F:.

So my questions are:

1) Why does this happen?
2) Which app do you recommend I use to recover the data?
3) Is there a way of simply `initializing` the drive and have it
rebuild the various structures it needs to see the data which is
manifestly still perfectly intact on the drive?

Cheers!

.

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