External hard drive not recognized

I have an external hard drive that is not being recognized properly by Windows XP. The drive is a Maxtor 3000LS 40GB. The problem started after I loaded XP SP2. The hard drive was showing as not being formatted, since there wasn't anything on the drive that I couldn't replace I re-formatted. Everything seemed  to be okay for a couple of days and then I started having problems with programs I had loaded on that drive which were causing problems with the OS. I did a complete system restore (wiped the C drive clean and reloaded Windows) with the original restore CD. The original Windows that came with the computer is ME. I could find the external hard drive in ME, but it did not have a drive letter associated with it in the system. I assigned the letter F to this drive and tried to format but was unable to complete through Windows ME. I then re-installed XP. The hard drive shows up in Device Manager under disk drives as "Maxtor (square)A RES C64K USB Device". It also shows as working properly and I can't update the driver as Windows can't find a better driver. Under volumes it is listed as Disk 1, Type - Unknown, Status - Unreadable, Partition style - Not Applicable, Capacity - 0MB, Unallocated space - 0MB, Reserved space - 0MB. It won't show up under Disk Management and the capacity being listed as 0MB is strange as ME showed the drive with the proper capacity even though the drive letter was not assigned. Of course, the drive is not covered under warranty (ran out 2 months ago) or I would be dealing with Maxtor. Any ideas on what to do?