Hey William -

I'm surprised that it was already formatted, but nonetheless, are you running on USB 2.0, USB 1.x or Firewire (1394) connection? Probably won't cause it not to work (as USB 2 is supposed to be backward compatible) but will cause performance issues.

If you are using Windows 2000 or XP you can use the control panel applet for disk management, check out file:///C:/windows/system32/diskmgmt.msc
(not sure if that will come up in a link or not, otherwise just run that file).

Then its pretty straight forward for finding the device, partitioning it, and formatting it.

You can do the same thing outside of the control panel if you are using an older operating system using FDISK. however BE CAREFUL. I'm surprised they didn't give you software to do this.