Seagate external hard drive problems

[aherzberg5]

I bought a 500GB Seagate external hard drive and when I plug it in, it recognizes it but as a disk drive and when i try to access it, it just wants me to insert disk. there is no folder I can find that I can transfer files into. I tried disk management, its on disk 5 and it says it is working properly. Is it just recognizing it incorrectly, if so how can i format it correctly?

 

[nhasian]

In Disk Management, make sure it has an active partition, and format it as NTFS.

 

[pjmelect]

Silly question but you did plug the drive into the wall socket and not just the USB port? Did the bright light on the front of the case light up when you plugged it into the USB socket? There should be no need to format or partition the drive as this should already have been done by the manufacture.