Need help with external HD issue

I am running Vista Home Basic on my laptop, and i have a Seagate 500GB external Hard Drive. I wanted to reformat the drive to a FAT32, and i followed some instructions on a website that said to delete the volume in Disk Management. Well i did that, and now i cant get the hard drive to appear again on my computer. I have tried system restore, rebooting the computer, take out the USB and put it back in, but i cant seem to get the hard drive recognized anymore. I tried uninstalling it and reinstalling it as well, still nothing. It appears in Device Manager, but not in disk management or my computer. It makes that little noise when i connect it, so i know the computer knows its connected, but i cant seem to access it. Help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thank you.

hello
try going back to device manager, right click it and choose scan for hardware changes.
see if its recognized after that... what program are you using to format to fat32? (I didn't think vista could do a drive over 32gb in fat32)... good luck