WD Hard Drive Doesn't Work Properly

I recently bought a Western Digital hard drive. (Western Digital Element 1TB 3.5" Black External Hard Drive). I have a desktop running Windows XP and a laptop running vista. I got it to backup files from my desktop, which I did - I put maybe 400 GB on it and it worked just fine. I was able to watch videos that I put on there and everything.

I hooked it up to my laptop and it worked fine there as well. But when I tried to hook it back up to the desktop again to back up more files, it's not working correctly.

It will take about 30 - 40 seconds to even recognize the drive and when it does, i'll go 1 or two folders deep into it before it freezes and my entire computer locks up. As soon as I just unplug the USB cable, everything works fine again. (Sometimes it will have to quit and restart windows explorer.)

Any idea what is going on and how I can get it to work without reformating?

**it still works fine with my laptop with vista**

Thanks,
Kyle

doesnt sound healthy, hope you didnt delete the files on the desktop after you copied them across.

but you say it works perfectly on the laptop? thats weird.

after you've retrieved anything you want off the drive, you could try deleting the partition off the drive using the laptop and then plugging it back into the desktop and use disk management to recreate the partition from fresh

also thinking that perhaps vista did something to it, did it mention readyboost or anything like that when you first plugged it in? did you need to activate the partition again or do anything other than plugging it in prior to using it?

I didn't install anything or click on readyboost. As far as I can remember, I just used it like a normal hard drive.