Why won't my external hard drive mount?

Hi
I am having problems getting my new iMac to recognise an external hard drive.  It is a 40gb Western Digital hard drive that I copied over photos and music from my old computer (not an Apple) on.  When I plug it in to the USD port it recognises the hard drive but then drops it after about 2 minutes and then it won't recognise it again until I restart the computer at which point it recognises it again for 2 minutes.
The hard drive work's fine on my Thinkpad and my Dell desktop.
Can anyone help?
Thanks.

It doesn't make sense.
Anyway, I found the solutions. Download software for solving this problem.
Here is the link:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

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