External Drive does not mount on desktop

Hi,
I did a Leopard upgrade and most everything went smoothly. But when I boot, Leopard pops up a window telling me that a disk I inserted is unreadable (it took me a time or two to realize it WAS referring to my USB 2.0 external hard drive).
It gives me the option to ignore, initialize or eject. Thus my hard drive won't mount on my desktop. It DOES show up in Disk Utility, however, so maybe there is hope.
So what are my options? Am I looking at burning DVDs all day so I can re-initialize or reformat this drive for Leopard?
I appreciate any help, and I did a lot of searching on this topic, so I'm aware that there may not be any solutions as of yet.
Many Thanks, Frank B.

Hi Andre, I can't remember except to say that it was mounting fine with tiger and I was able to copy files to it for backup purposes.
I just hooked it up to a PC and windows tells me the drive is not formatted. That's not a good sign, and this was stupid: I think I had the drive hooked up to my Mac Pro during the upgrade.
Idiotic, granted. But this was an upgrade, not a full install and I maybe was trusting in Apple's ability not to do extraneous stuff during an install like windows does. Oh well...
I appreciate any further ideas. Many Thanks, Frank.

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