Wireless Card No Longer Detected.

i'm not at home right now, I'm at work so I don't have my computer in front of me. Anyway I'll just give the basics and I hope someone can help me:

It's a gateway notebook I bought last year, and last night while I was online all of a sudden windows XP just completely cut out and my computer rebooted, it took awhile but eventually it came back on. However, once it came back on my wireless card (internal) was no longer detected, and I have no idea how I can get onto the internet. Nothing even comes up that says wireless network not connected. I'm kind of a noob to this stuff, but I did try a few things and eventually the computer just told me that I did not have a network card installed.

I have no idea what to do, and I'm thinking about getting the stuff I need off of it and then just using the boot disk to reinstall the operating system and start from scratch. Would anyone recommend not doing that? Or recommend another method to try before I do attempt a reboot? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

---Mike Slag

if you go into device manager (right click on my computer > manage > device manager) can you see the wireless card under network adapters?