Another thing to try, unplug the drive, create a new admin user, log into said user, plug in the drive and see if you can see it in Disk Utility.

If you cannot see it in any OS X or OS 9 disk utilities to try and reformat it, I'd say that you've got 2 choices.
1) Do an Archive and Install (saving users) of your OS since the problem appears to have originated there. You said the drive worked in CompUSA.
or
2) Return it and try again. The drive's partition map might be so screwed up now that it doesn't know which end is up.

thanks for all of your help.
ill give your recommendations a shot and will let you know the outcome.

enjoy the game

well it worked.

i took back my western digital external hard drive, exchanged for a Acom data external hard drive (which actually came with a DETAILED manual)
plugged it in, an Bingo!! backup bliss!! Wish me luck on my upgrade to the black cat tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for their help with my issues especially yellow! greatly appreciated!!

hey yellow, last i saw the pats were up by three, with about 1:45 left in the game. did your team beat the titans?

Glad to hear you got rid of that thing. Good luck with Panther. Check out this long thread for some tips on installing Panther.

Yes! Next stop, AFC Championship!! Close games give me heart attacks. But it wouldn't be a true Patriots game if there wasn't a chance that they could loose it all..

I'm jumping in here but I think your issue is with the disk utility. It has to see the drive to reformat it. Until you format it for Mac, the Mac OS will never see the drive in the Finder. So if your utility for formatting is failing to see the drive then try to find out why.

If the other Macs (at the store) can see it, then have their utilities reformat it, then bring it home and try again.