USB flash drive gets not formatted error

I have a Desktop as well as a Laptop at home running with Windows XP SP2. I have few USB Drives those working very fine on my laptop and they also contain very important datas. The problem is whenever I connect them with the desktop, I can see the driver installation message in the task bar, they even get Drive letter. But when I double click them to open, I get the following error message:

"The disk in drive X is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

This is annoying. Why do I need to format them, they are working fine on my laptop. Any idea what could be the problem and how can I get rid of this? Please help.

I had the same problem. The only solution was to format the flash drive with NTFS and not FAT32. The info on the drive will be lost.

I am still having problems with my other USB drives and devices. My Western Digital 320MB USB drive gets the "Disk not formatted" error as does my digital camera. The camera's memory card can be formatted to NTFS by my computer except the camera will not recognize it. The camera will format it except I think it is FAT32 and then my computer will not read it.
Hope this helps.

i too hav the same problem with my usb drive.i used to have a 4gb pendrive ,and now its corrupted.since then what ever the pendrive or my memory card reader inserted to my usb drive,the drive is accessing with the name of the pendrive which i used it before.and also getting the error message saying that usb is not formatted do u want to format it now or not??iam using windows sp2 and i reinstalled my usb drivers,rebooted.but still getting the same proble.plz help me

The only way it worked for me was using and NTFS format on the USB drive. The procedure for formating is at: http://www.ntfs.com/quest22.htm
YOU WILL LOOSE ALL THE DATA ON THE DRIVE.
Happirock