The fact you can't create a partition suggests some low level damage may have occured at the beginning of the drive. Badly timed power failures can sometimes cause that.
You should run
Maxtor diagnostics and try to perform a low level format of the drive. That might return it to usable; if not, or if the low level format hangs as well, the drive is most likely permanently damaged.
The moral? Invest in a small UPS unit. They aren't expensive and you would be really wishing you had one right about now, if the outage had got the drive with your data instead of the fresh Vista install.
