[NTLUG:Discuss] USB drive

[Fred]

I bought an external drive box at Tanners that is a
USB-to-ide conversion. I used qtparted to partition 
an IDE drive as FAT32, then used 
mkdosfs -F 32 -I /dev/hdb1 to finish the job (I think).
I connected the drive to the box, plugged it into a
USB port and nothing. The system (opensuse 10.2)
does not see it. Flash drives work ok. This 160GB
drive works fine when hooked to the IDE bus and the 
system then sees it as basically an empty FAT32 drive. 

So what am I doing wrong? How do I make it work?
Google hasn't helped.

Fred