External USB hard disk not detected by Windows Vista

Sorry if this has been asked before, but search turned up no results specific to my plight. I recently purchased an external drive from buy.com through dealrocker discount deal. When I plugged it in a pop-up windows comes up which said "Device is now ready, please install the driver". I have already installed all the latest drivers. It doesn't show up in My Computer so I can't access it. Device manager shows hard drive in USB port, but again I can't do anything. Can anyone help me to fix this problem?

sounds like the drive is not formatted, typically these drives come pre-formatted when you buy them, but not always. If this is the case, simply go to start, control panel, administrative tools, computer management, then disk management. You should see the new drive listed in here, and likely it is either not initialized or simply shows up as unallocated space. If uninitialized, right click on the volume and initialize it. The next step is formatting the drive, so right click and select format. Follow the default values and basically just hit next on each passing screen. After which it will begin formatting and a little while later, it will be listed as a a new drive letter and labeled as "Healthy". After this it should show up in your My Computer.

Of course if the drive does not show up in the administrative tools its possible that the drive or the USB controller inside the external casing is damaged and you may have to RMA it. But heres hoping the drive is fine

Yeah it sounds like the drive just needs to be formatted.

Windows Vista is not a brilliant OS but it should not be an incompatibility issue.