Windows Vista Vista wants to initialize removeable drive

I have just bought a new desktop running Vista home premium. I have been running this OS on my laptop since it came out so I am Ok with it.
My previous desktop ran XP and I used a Maxtor external drive for backups (powered 3.5 drive). Plugging the drive into the new vista machine and it does not appear in explorer. It can be seen in disk management however as an 'unallocated' drive. I cannot assign it a drive letter (not that I want to anyway as its removeable) as I keep getting the error 'drive not initilized'. It does give me the option of formatting it - but this drive has al of my data on! I have tried everything I can - I even bought a new drive enclosure and swapped it over but get the same error. I want to initialize it without having to format but it seems to be impossible. I can plug in other USB drives (WD passport) and it appears as a removeable drive should. It could be that the drive is corrupt but this is unlikely as all I did was unplug it from one machine and plug into the new one? It was formatted under XP when new as NTFS and I have had no issues with it. Its driving me mad - been on it for three days and searched everywhere.......any help/ideas would be appreciated?

 

Go to the Windows Orb (Start) type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter. In the left column of the Graphical View, right-click the icon/wording "˜Disk number’ > Properties > Policies Tab. There are two options: "˜Optimize for quick removal’ and "˜Optimize for performance‘. Make sure "˜Optimize for quick removal’ is used for your external disk.

And, perhaps right-click the graphic and allocate a letter near the end of the alphabet. This can always be changed.

 

When you first got the external drive, did you install the Maxtor software that came with it? The Maxtor software may make the drive unreadable on a different computer (for security?). You would probably need to install the Maxtor software on the Vista computer.

Matt