WD Elements not appearing in Disk Utility

I have a Western Digital Elements 500GB external hard drive that is not getting picked up on my macbook. The drive is FAT32 formatted and works perfectly on my windows machine at work. I have had this drive for a month and it has only been picked up by my macbook twice (both times i've unplugged and replugged in several times before it was picked up).

I would think it could be the usb cord, but it works fine when i use it on my work machine. I dont think its the USB on my macbook because other thumb drives and usb devices work on the macbook. What can the problem be? It doesn't even show up in Disk Utility.. HELPP

You could try to back up the drive and reformat it using the windows computer. Then plug it back in to the mac and see if it is still picked up. It would be better if you could do this in disk util. Do u have access to another mac to test the drive on?