Hi lads and lass'

Have got an external maxtor hdd that has two partitions one 185G and the other 55G.
Both are NTFS but are now showing as RAW. This happened just last week when I swithed to the firewire port from the usb2 port. So I have many hdd diagnostics and the boot sectors are bad.
Question: Is there any way I can repair these boot sectors without loosing the info on the drives or do I painstakingly have to recover all the files using a recovery program? (I have used handy recovery 2 on a couple of files to see if they were recoverable and it said everything on the hdd was deleted, but i was able to recover the files i tried)

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated

Tezza