Need help with external hard drive

[old dog 2]

I have a external HD that I installed on my computer. The computer is running XP. I tried it after I was done. When I was going through the steps I let it pick its drive letter. It picked "K" and I said ok. Like I said I tried to save to it and it worked. Now for some reason it says it is "L". When I try to save to it now I get this window that says "L:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". So I went to Settings - Control panel - administrative tools - computer management - storage - disk management. I see drive "L" it says it healthy. I also see the other drives. Drive c has a file system of NTFS. Drive d has a file system of fat 32. But drive L has no file system but says it is healthy and has a capacity of 189 gb.
There is a what I call a tool bar at the top of this window and one of the buttons is called "action". When I click on this and then "all tasks - properties - hardware". I see the drive and it says " maxtor 6L200po usb device is working properly - location 0.
I have no idea what happened. Anyone have any idea. My thinking is to reformat the drive. There is nothing on the drive that I can't lose.
Thanks for your help ahead of time.
old dog 2

[ktkendall]

Thats what I would do. You should just be able to right click it there in disk management and should give oyu the little pop up menu with option to format.. Did you unplug it, then replug it into a different usb port?? I'm thinking if you did that could have caused the problem in the first place.

[old dog 2]

Thats what I did. Guess what. Half way through we had a storm. The power went off. When it came back on I started over. It all went well this time and now everything is ok.
Thanks for your help!!