Computer Management Snap In Launcher

Hello,
I apologize in advance if I am in the wrong section of the forum. Not sure if this is a hardware or software issue.

I plugged in a SanDisk 32GB Flash Drive and it was not showing up in My Computer - but it was in the Safely Remove Hardware section so I am able to remove it.

I started doing some searching and found steps to go to the Computer Management section - right click on computer and select Manage. When there I clicked on Disk Management on the left side of the screen and on the right side the drive was not in the upper section but it was in the lower section and stated Unallocated. I looked that up and then right clicked on the drive and selected New Simple Volume. There was a quick popup box about something but then the drive did appear with the information Removable 29.88GB Online. When I then clicked on it to format it I got an error stating that the Disk Management Console View is not up to date. When I closed the boxes to try restarting the program (as was suggested) there was some sort of box that stated something about snap-in but I didn't realize it was something that I had not seen before and closed it before I realized I had not read that popup box.

Anyway, I tried restarting the MMC as well as refreshing it and simply shutting down the pc for about an hour and then restarting it and plugging in the flash drive but it still was not being seen in the My Computer and now in Disk Management the drive is back to stating 31.19 GB Unallocated. I removed the flash drive and installed it into a pc running Windows XP and it was not showing up there either but after clicking on my computer and going to disk management I was able to format the drive and it was then showing up in My Computer. (however the only format option I had was FAT32). I removed it from the XP machine and put it into the Vista machine again but it still is only showing up in the Safely Remove Hardware Section.

I went back to the disk management section and I am back to Removable 31.19 GB Unallocated Space and the word online under the information.

Before I go any further and screw everything up can someone please point me in the right direction to fix things so that I can use this flash drive. There is nothing on it and it is fairly new (never actually even used it before)

Thanks So Very Much

 

Well, I'm not sure what the issue is with the Computer Management errors but I did figure out how to fix the flash drive. I went to the SanDisk website and found steps there for how to fix a problem when the Cruzer flash drive is not detected. (and I can't believe I didn't think to check the device manger to begin with).
Regarding the flash drive I just went to device manager and looked for an icon with the exclamation point, clicked to uninstall it and then selected to scan for hardware changes and now the flash drive is visible in the my computer section!

Not sure if the reason for the issue in computer management had to do with the flash drive having the exclamation mark in device manager or if there is an issue with that as well but at least the flash drive is now working and I was able to format it to NTFS as well!