DriveStation Velocity calling itself a "Virtual CDRom USB Device"...

[thefunkyfaz]

I bought the Buffalo DriveStation Velocity 2 gig hard drive (HD-LXU3) about 2 months ago and up until tonight had been very impressed with it. But it got stuck part way through a file transfer, and after that disappeared as a drive. I rebooted and eventually it can up as a virtual cdrom usb device, and will not let me access any files, it just asks me to insert a disk.
Having bought this to replace an old MyBook  that died recently, and having spent an entire weekend retrieving files (and saving them onto the new drive) please don't tell me that I've got to go through that again with a 2 month old piece of kit....  >:(