External Maxtor Hard drive being forced to reformat !!??????

Ok, so i recently got rid of my laptop which ran with vista on it which was the first computer associated with the hard drive. I then bought a nice new desktop computer instead. And with this I transferred files from the 500gb external hard drive to the new desktop via the usb cable.

The computer has an xp sp2 operating system on it and so this could be the problem?

When i connected it to the desktop computer I maybe had to remove the usb once or twice for it to find that it was a maxtor external hard drive. It worked fine when it was found. Now whenever I connect it to the computers, it has found a connected device on both the xp and vista systems, but when i click the maxtor icon it says,

"The file or directory is corrupted or unreadable"

my computers were virus free, and now when I click manage on 'my computer' it has found the hard drive, but says it has 100% free space, and the only way of using it is to format it !!!

omg i don't want to lose all my stuff, there is definitely stuff on it so it cant be reading the hard drive beyond its storage capacity !!

any suggestions as to how to get it working?

maybe i need to download a programme to help the xp sp2 system to recognize its existence..... I don't know but any help would be really appreciated !

 

Take the drive to another Vista machine to see if you can access it first.

cheers ...

 

yes, I have just connected it to my dads vista pc, and it works fine, all the data is on it and is located under drive F:/

unlike my new pc which it located under drive E:/ ??

does this help ?

 

Try use a different USB cable or port on your XP computer, sounds like your original one is a bit loose.

 

nope, tried to replace it with all the other usb ports with working devices on them. Such as wireless mouse and external sound card, but still no look, yet when i replace it with the other components, they work??

Also i plugged it into a different vista computer (my dads) and it worked straight away !

any more advice ?

 

On the vista PC, plug in the drive, and in My Computer, right click the drive's icon and go to properties.

What does it say is the file system? (eg FAT, NTFS etc)

 

Hi it says, 'NTFS'....

what now buddy ?

 

Drat. Windows XP supports NTFS, so unfortunately it's not the cause.

 

ohh poo ! I recently plugged it into my old vista laptop, (the one stated in the original problem description), and as it loaded up I plugged in my usb cable and it came up with all this external hd crap, said it was a NTFS then loaded 3 steps, then it worked evertime I plugged it in. Unfortunatly my new computer (with xp sp2) will not connect with the external hd even though it has done so before !

STTUPID THING !