external hard drive help please

hi everyone i just bought a external hardrive called maxtor personal storage 3200. now all you are meant to do is plug it in and windows will give the drive a name. well i done all that but its not shown in my computer not on the screen, do i have to format it first so that it shows up?? im really upset with this can any one help please thankyou chris

to ddp, sorry my friend im new with this external drive the leaflet tells me windows xp should have read the frive and they say it has one big parton on it,now i right clicked my computermthen i selected manage then computer management and disk management. thats where i got to beause on the box on the right side just showed the c: drive
and underneath it that box showed a box saying disk o which is the c: drive then cd rom o which is my dvd and cd rom1 which is my dvd rw . now can you please advise my what you mean by initiate the drive because i cant see my external one on the screen and how do i initiate the drive. sorry, im a right pain but i just dont know what to do. thank you for your patience chri hope to hear from you soon

hi again yes there is its in the other devices part now i clicked on that and it says install driver but i have no software with it, and also when i installed it a box came up saying found new hardware and again ask me you search for driver in floppy and the other drives

oh yeah also i clicked on the question mark and looked in the device status and it said driver not installed code 28 if that means anything, i thought you just plug it in and it loaded the drivers sor some reason i would not be a setting in my cmos would it ???

seriously, i dont think it should require any drivers to be loaded to work. Like Dragonz17 says: is the AC power pluuged in? because without it, it would act just like you say it is, so you may wanna check that.. It wont be a setting in the CMOS or BIOS because the OS runs at a higher level, to put it simply (above the HAL)...

cheers nickberry, well i checked all the leads and like i said earlier mate a window comes up saying found new device and do i want to search for drivers i say no and thats it, this has really got me cheers mate

okay - ignoring the hard drive for a moment, check this for me, do you have a USB 2.0 / Enhanced controlller listed in the device manager?

also - if you switch the view to 'devices by connection' where does the unrecognised device appear? i find 'devices by connection so much easier to understand as you can see eveything as it is actually connected up physically...

hi nickberry, well mate i looked at the manual and in the device manager and yes i have usb 2 and looked in device manager as you said and i have a enchanced usb controller but as you look at where it says enchanced controller theres a connection leading away from it and thats a usb root hub

hiya cphicks! - thats great - each USB controller has a USB hub attached to it (a USB hub consists of 2 USB sockets). And the unkown device - where does that appear? how many USB controllers are listed ? do you have any other USB devices you can use to locate the one that is USB2?