Win 7 usb 3.0 not recognizing drive then macrium clone/image of drive

[netrate]

Looking for the right way to achieve this :

I have an external drive Samsung SSD 500 gig I want to use as a Clone/Image of my Win 7 drive, but my win 7 is not recognizing it.
Win 7 shows the usb icon in the bottom right hand corner and lets me eject if necessary, but win explorer won't see it.

Usually when I plug in a USB drive or thumbdrive, it creates a drive letter and lets me examine the contents, but not this one.
It is a Samsung 500 gig, with 2 partitions - I am going to format it completely and transfer over my Win 7 to the drive via Macrium Clone/image

My attempts:

• So far I have installed the newest versions of USB 3.0 for the mobo - there is NO yellow icons in the device manager
• I have gone into the Partition manager/disk manager and had to make both partitions active and added a drive letter - now I can see them in win explorer - strange why I had to do this instead of just seeing them plug/play
• I can see the two partitions, but not the Healthy primary or Healthy recovery partitions (normal I suppose) -
  NOTE : I can see all partitions in the disk management tool (4 of them)

Am I ready now to format?
Am I ready for Macrium Reflect ?

 

[BamaInArk]

If it's a new drive it has to be, crap forget the term now, before the OS/system will see it. Once that is done the Macrium Reflect Cloning process will take care of the rest.
Why make 2 partitions? The Cloning process will copy the partitions from the drive you are Cloning.