It sounds like your storage drive isn't looking at anything (i.e. "He's dead Jim"). But, I could be wrong. If you put the drive back in the system and reboot, you may be able to run fsck on the partitions and not lose anything. Any data on any of the drives that were formatted during your last install is gone. If there was anything that is no longer on a drive that is currently mounted on your system, then you can't get it back. Any data on the 80GB drive might be able to be recovered, but if you can't mount it, then I wouldn't hold my breath.
Put the drive back in the system. Forget about using any GUI to do anything, they often do things that you don't want them to do (e.g. adding the partitions to the fstab file). Once you have put the drive in the system, you will need to determine what device file points to the drive partitions (it will be something like /dev/hda1, though probably not that). Once you are able to determine the device node, you need to run fsck on each of the partitions (these examples are based on my example above, replace hda1 and hda2, etc. with your partitions device file names)
Code:
fsck /dev/hda1
fsck /dev/hda2
...
If you are able to successfully run fsck on each of the partitions, then you should be able to mount the partitions and get whatever data is there. If you get this far, I would recommend moving the data off this disk and never using it again. However, if you are confident that it isn't a hardware failure then don't worry about it.