can't find the portable Hard Drive icon

I've got a Smarkdisk Portable Hard Drive. the icon isn't showing up on the desktop. thing is, I don't even know what it's called to search for it. Any suggetions?

Assuming you have not turned off "show hard disks on desktop" from your Finder preferences, is the hard drive formatted? Can you see it all from Disk Utilities?

Regards.

you probably have to twitch some finder settings. that's not a problem but if its not finder or anything else, it may be a problem with your mac's reading. send in for repair through apple care.

macdogger said:

you probably have to twitch some finder settings. that's not a problem but if its not finder or anything else, it may be a problem with your mac's reading. send in for repair through apple care.

Click to expand...

That's a bit overzealous. Please don't post if you're not familiar with the problem.

You probably just need to format the drive. Open Disk Utility (Applications => Disk Utility). You should see the drive appear in the list in the left pane. Click the drive name and then click the Erase tab at the right. Select your 'Volume Format' (Should be set to 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' ). Then click 'Erase'.