Fixing an invisible CrossFire USB/Firewire drive

Symptom: Compaq Presario V6101US notebook will not recognize a USB drive previously formatted for Macintosh OS X 10.3.9, although USB recognizes that a removable drive is plugged in and provides a System Tray icon to safely dismount it.

Answer: Partition (and format) the Smartdisk CrossFire 120 Gb USB 2.0/Firewire hard drive as follows:

1. Run compmgmt.msc
2. Select Disk Management
3. Right click on disk 1 (YMMV!), and select format (or was that partition? — in any case, use NTFS for Windows XP)

You can recognize the appropriate drive because it has no partition, and it is 115 Gb, roughly (some is reserved for CrossFire firmware use, evidently). The bar above the window is black, not blue. Partitioning takes about 80 or 90 minutes with a USB connection! The software is good about reporting percentage completion.