External harddrive - recognised as connected but not available to use

Right, just bought a 400Gig external harddrive thinking it would be a far easier option than faffing about formatting a second internal. Sadly I was wrong

I have tried using both USB ports I have but in both cases the hardware is recognised as existing (judging by the appearance of the 'safely remove hardware' option) but is nowhere to be seen on My Computer. The installation software is dire, simply giving me a host of free software options but nothing useful and giving a full user manual but insisting I need Acrobat reader 6.1 when I already have 7.0

The only issue I can see, and that I should have spotted before, is that the system requirements wants a Pentium-III or AMD Duron processor, I am on Celeron. I was under the impression that that was not usually an issue but it seems that I may have been mis-informed. All other requirements are met, shame on me if that is the problem

The hard drive is a Freecom 400GB 3.5''

System spec:

Late 2001
900MHz Celeron Processor
128KB Cache
256 PC100 168 pin RAM (from 128)
20GB HDD - pretty much full
Running XP

Edited by Wheathampstead Brko, 19 August 2007 - 10:17 AM.