How do you format a drive which doesn't show in finder

I have two Western Digital external hard drives which I have used on my iMac before. I am trying to use them for the first time since the Lion update and when I plug them in they light up but are not recognized by the computer. Is there a fix for this?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Marcia

Finder > Preferences > General
This will force the system to look for them if they ever decide not to show up in Finder.
But you need to use Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities), which always sees any device attached, even if the format is incorrect. This will format the device as GUID wth ExtendedJournaled partitions.

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