USB hard disk enclosure and vista

I recently had an mp3 player that died, and instead of throwing away the still working hard disk, i bought a 2.5 inch caddy from maplins and tried to install that on my main vista P.C, it showed up under the computer menu, but each time i tried to format it it told me that it was write protected, after a bit of faffing around it now tells me to insert media into drive (F)

Ive tried the computer management thing in vista ( administrative toold/storage/disk management, and it sometimes shows up as unallocated, or it doesnt show up at all.

and in both cases the computer management bit always frezes when the disk is connected.

Ive also tried formating it in command on vista, as well as chkdsk but again nothing works.

However when plugged into my old XP P.C everything works as it should, it formatted without a problem, and i can transfer stuff to and from it using windows XP, plug it into my new(er) vista P.,C and it wont work, instead it tells me it needs formatting.

the caddy used is this

http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=46678&doy=14m75