Can't see my USB drive icon

I have a small USB Flash drive that has always been formatted in FAT (16). This drive works fine on my iMac G5 with OSX 10.4.8. However, when I take the drive home to my iMac (Intel) also running the latest OS X version, I cannot get the icon to appear in the sidebar or on the desktop. The drive is mounted and usable because I can open it via Spotlight, and I see it in Disk Utility. I used to see the icon, then it just stopped being seen. It may have been after one of the automatic software updates to the OS, but I cannot be sure.
So any ideas as to why the drive icon is visible on G5 but not Intel iMac?

What usually works well is to plug the flash drive back in. With luck it will appear on the desktop, and be accessible. That is when you should unmount the drive properly. To unmount the drive, do one of the following -
• Select the drive by clicking its icon once, then press Command-E (Eject in the File menu).
• Right-click or Control-click the icon for the drive, and select Eject from the contextual menu that appears.
• Drag the icon to the Trash. The Trash icon will change to an eject symbol when you're partway there - keep dragging it all the way to the Trash, drop it into that symbol.
Once the drive has been unmounted you can safely unplug it.

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Can I include external usb drives and sticks in Time Machine backups?
This was the question I searched a week for. My machine is a MBAir with Yosemite. I have a bunch of USB HD and sticks. This is a sharing of what it took to solve. I lost a couple of important document revisions lately because of not having differential backups on them, so wanted to include them in Time Machine.
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<Personal Information Edited by Host>

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http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753703.aspx
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TechNet Community Support

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