[BART]

I just bought a new MAC laptop and decided to use my 2TB external HD to set up time machine. It informed me that the HD would have to be erased and reformatted in order to be used with time machine. I set upon doing this and part way through got an input/output error, I disconnected the drive and reconnected it only to see "this drive is not recognized, would you like to initialize it?", when I choose yes I get an input output error. I know for a fact the drive works because I just used it to transfer everything from my old MAC to the new one and have also recently used it on my XP laptop. I try it on XP now and XP completely ignores it. My guess is that it has something to do with the fact that I had both OSX and windows files on it (just a guess) so my question is, is there a back door into this drive or something so that I can get it going again? In OSX disc utility it shows up as an unformatted 2TB external usb storage device.