external hard-drive shows up on desktop but not in disk utilities... gahhh!

[abdulah]

hi, i'm pretty new to this thing so here goes,

i bought a simpletech usb external hard drive this past summer and used it with my windows vista. Everything was fine. I then switched to a macbook pro. I tried reformating with disk utilities. clicked erase. got an error. and tried again.

it doesn't show up as anything in disk utilities. it shows up in the finder window as a hard drive icon but it shows up on the desktop as a folder icon. it wont let me do anything with it. i get an error message saying it can't read or write.

also it wont eject. it says its in use but nothing is open. i pulled it out and the icon stays on the desk top. when i plug it back in it just makes another icon. they don't go away unless i restart the comp.

also... one more thing... it clicks.... i have been hearing of this click of death... is it dead???

any help would be awesome!
Thanks a bunch

 

[BlueRevolution]

also... one more thing... it clicks.... i have been hearing of this click of death... is it dead???

If it's not dead it's dying. I've never heard of a dying hard drive behaving like that, but that's likely your problem.