USB drive not visible after unplugging from Wii

I have a new Toshiba USB 2.0 hard drive which holds my games for my softmodded wii. I'm running Windows Vista 32 bit on a Dell Dimension 9200.

I can load games onto the hard drive fine, and they play on the Wii, but when I then unplug the hard drive from the Wii and plug back into to my computer the drive doesn't appear in explorer. The device is viewable in device manager, the games still load ok on the Wii, and if I plug into another computer it's visible.

I ran system restore back to a point before I first used the drive, plugged the drive back it, it installed the drivers and worked fine again. But as soon as I plugged it into the Wii and then back into the computer again the problem recurred. I've tried uninstalling the driver and reinstalling to no avail.

Does anyone know why this might be happening and what i can do other than constantly running system restore?

What is the drive formatted to? if is formatted to WBFS windows can't use it, it will see it in device manager but it will ask you to format it before you can use it.

Hi, It's NTFS