Vista - renamed drive,formatted drive, now won't show up

Augh,

I recently purchased a SimpleTech Simple Drive by Fabrik, I thought it was a simple click and drag process but when I got home it has been nothing but a nightmare. I plugged in the usb and I tried to open the drive when it said i couldn't, I looked up why, and it was because multiple "things" were using the same drive letter? C:/ D:/ , whatever, so I went into Disk Management and renamed the external hard drive to K://, then it asked me if I wanted to format my external hard drive and naturally that's what I thought one was suppose to do, the process took over two plus hours, the next day when I went to System and Maintenance to begin backing up files, the drive would not show up on the drop down bar, only thing that hows up is Cd/DVD F: drive, the drive won't show up anywhere, not in Disk Management, not on My computer, only place it shows up is Device Manager under "Disk Drives-SD1 Device"

Did I do something wrong? Why won't it show up now, what can I do to fix this?

Hello weitzu42 and welcome to the forums

a quick trawl around the web indicates that you are not alone with problems seeing your Simple drive . a couple of things to try ...

check in disk management and see if you have an area of unallocated space equal to the size of the drive which would indicate that the format you did was unsuccessful

try updating the driver in device manager

alternatively remove the driver and re-install

Or it could be a simple case of faulty hardware which it seems is not unheard of with these drives in which case replacement would be your only option .

hope this helps