Can't access external hard drive

I'm running Win98SE...trying to attach a Maxtor external 200 GB hard drive.

I was able to partition the drive, but upon restart I get the error message "a device attached to the system is not functioning."

In "my computer" I can see the F: assigned to this drive, but can't open it. I think it still needs to be formatted, but I can't do that yet because all I get is that error message.

In searching online I find a variety of problems with this error message, but none seem to apply to this situation.

I'm having other software/error messages with this computer--just uninstalled Norton Cleansweep and that fixed some of it--but I'm stuck on the hard drive issue.

Ideas?

 

In My Computer, Right click on it and select "Format".

wrs

 

That did it. Thanks. If only all problems were so easily solved.

I'm now going to go change my experience level from "intermediate" to "newbie"...