Can't find external USB hard drive

[Sleepless in New Jersey]

After a format and complete reinstall of XP, I plugged in my USB external
hard drive. The expected notifications appeared in the taskbar area telling
me that new hardware had been found and that it had been installed and was
ready to use. However, neither My Computer nor Windows Explorer showed the
drive. Thus, the drive is unusable.

Is there anything I can do about this?

BTW: the drive was accessible and working before the reinstall.

 

[Sleepless in New Jersey]

Thanks for replying.

Yes, I did. In addition, I updated XP through Microsoft Update.

There was something else that I should have mentioned. I used Partition
Magic to delete what had been a single HTFS partition, intending to establish
a fresh FAT32 partition. This action may have gone astray, as I couldn't
complete the task.