Red light on external drive

I was preparing to copy some of my library files to an external hard drive. Somehow I clicked something and there was a little "poof" and now the computer fails to recognize the hard drive. Also a red light suddenly appeared on the external drive. I did a disk utility and "verified" the hard drive so I know that it is still "there". It's like I turned it off.
I know that the power is sufficient as I have used it many times; I have a Y shaped connector that goes to both USB ports.
How do I get the external drive to come back or wake up or get recognized?
Thanks very much in advance!

Ah ha! It's just gone out of the list on Finder. If I reformat the way finder displays it appears...it's just not in the leftmost column.
So, it isn't an emergency. It's a formatting issue.
Any idea how to put it back??
Thanks again!

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