My Passport Ultra Won't load on Mac

I have a brand new, out of the box hard drive. I am running OSX 10.6. The passport shows up for about two seconds, and then goes away. This is unacceptable. It is formatted correctly, and there is nothing on it to erase, even if I could get to that. I do not have another computer to plug it in to, though it seems to be a mac to hard drive problem that has been going on for a while and yet to be resolved, anyway. How can I make my brand new, should be working fine, hard drive work? It’s definitely not my USB port, as everything else works fine.

Oh, also - it seems to just shut off after a few seconds. It whirs and blinks, then nothing.

Hello,

It is possible you are having some kind of power issue.

Make sure the drive is connected directly to the USB port. Preferably on the Back USB port.

I did that, and it seemed firmly plugged in each time. This is very frustrating. It doesn’t even show up in the disk utility.