question about home built external hd

I just put together my external hard drive enclosure, i just had a question about whether or not i have to format the drive before putting it in the external enclosure, its one of those firewire/usb 2.0 combos. anyone know?

I put it all together, plugged it in, and windows xp recognizes it, however it doesn't show up as a hard drive at all, infact it doesn't show up period even though it makes those new hardware found sounds...

Has it been formatted yet? Right-Click on MY Computer and go to manage. Go to Storage/Disk Management. If it doesn't have any volumes yet, right click on it in the right hand pane and click Format. Here you can format it and give it a letter.

i formatted it, although i had to take it out of the case and put it in my computer as a slave drive then i formatted it to be a logical drive, it was brand spanking new when i bought the drive. the casing i got from dealsonic works awesome, both firewire and usb 2.0 work very well..... you learn something new every day