Is the maxtor hard drive an external hard drive? If so, you can format it by using disk utility on your shiny new macbook pro.
Either use spotlight in the top right corner to search for disk utility, or go to Finder --> Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility.
Click on your external drive on the left side, then choose how you'd like to format it on the right side.
You shouldn't have to format it unless there's something wrong with the drive, because macs can see fat/fat32.