Brand new iMacs & an external USB drive disappeared on one of them - help?

I'm new to this particular forum & I just bought a 2.8 GHz intel iMac (my wife is picking up for me this moment) - my boss just bought a 3.06 GHz intel iMac a few days ago, he installed Parallels & then Vista Ultimate w/SP1. He has an external USB hard drive & it showed up mounted on the desktop. When Vista asked him (voices from the dark side) if he wanted to link the drive to Vista he said yes - that's when the drive disappeared & he said that he couldn't get it back & he said that he couldn't find it with the explorer in Vista either. He tried rebooting, tried reconnecting the drive, doing this w/o launching Vista, etc - but he said that it wouldn't come back. He is not experienced with Macs, only the dark side so he's not familar with the system yet. I have not seen his Mac yet. I'm at work, so I do not have access to a Mac, I cannot offer troubleshooting tips for this cold turkey w/o a Mac in front of me, as it has been over 5 years since I've seen a problem like this.
That is why I'm writing this here, because I know that this is no doubt a simple fix for most of you. I can try to get him to come to this discussions site.
I can't wait to fly my new Mac today - should I just go ahead and re-format (low-level) & install from scratch? Even though I've purchased Parallels also, which needs no partition, should I make a partition anyway, incase i want to also use the Boot Camp route on the other partition?
Thanks 1.0E6,
Gino

Success - He finally did get it back after shutting everything down, powering down, pulling its connection, bring the mac back up sans Parallels/Vista, connect up the drive, drive showed back up, then startup Parallels/Vista.
btw - my new iMac is a dream (2.8/500/24") - I changed the memory to 4 mb, low level formatted the Mac, installed the software & "wow-zer" compared to my older lapstand iMac
btw2 - I had posted before to other forums (Airport, Mail), but this was the 1st time to this particular forum (intel iMac)
Message was edited by: Gino La Pointe

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