Any Suggestions? External Seagate/Virtual Machine

Hi --

I wrapped a now-out-of-service XP-based system into a virtual machine loaded onto a SeaGate portable HD (FreeAgent). Been using it for two years periodically with no problems. Use VMWare Player to access from a fairly new HP Pavilion Win 7 machine. While I always "eject" properly to remove the USB-connected device, yesterday my Chrome froze and after trying to end task, I was forced to shut it down -- and forgot to eject properly but had not removed it from the USB. After reboot, I did eject the Seagate HD.

Today, I wanted to see if I could run a flatbed HP scanner that only runs on XP by loading up the XP virtual machine and running the scanner from it. Won't run, obviously, under the Win7 OS. Sooo, I plugged it into the USB port and up comes a message saying that that drive (K) had to be reformatted for the drive to display. Didn't want to do that. Clicked cancel. Then -- still hopeful -- I ran the VMPlayer, which wanted an OK to install a new version. I clicked no (for now) and machine froze...temporarily... mouse came back eventually but sloggy... I shut the whole dang thing down and removed the external drive and then rebooted. It rebooted fine.

I then plugged the Seagate back in and once again got the message telling me the drive in K had to be reformatted before it could be used and did I want to proceed. I clicked no...and then I did the eject. I then tested the Seagate on a laptop. After install of the driver, it gave me the same message about reformat.

And..then.. I came here.

Kinda surprised the external HD went from working fine to this ... Any one have any suggestions as to how to get it to run without me reformatting/losing everything on the external HD?

Any gut instincts?