External Harddrive issues

Hi guys,

I am a photographer with some really vital work on a hard drive that has for some reason stopped working properly. Reformatting is really not an option, the work on the hard-drive is irreplaceable, most of it is backed up but some recent work isn't.

I am using a Western Digital 750 GB Studio external hard-drive running it through a firewire 800 connection to my MacBook Pro 2.4 ghz laptop.

This morning I was in the middle of reinstalling Leopard onto the computer, I reformatted the whole main hard-drive, the external hard-drive was actually unplugged for most of this and then i started reinstalling some programs off the external. Somewhere along the line, maybe i disconnected the drive without safely removing it but it no longer appears on the the desktop, as though it hasnt been detected. The odd thing is that it still appears and verifies as being ok in disk utility.

Can someone please help!!! Thanks in advance

I know this may sound silly and I don't mean to test your intelligence, but have you made sure that you have "External Disks" checked off in the Finder "Show these items on the Desktop" option? (Finder -> Preferences)

If Disk Utility can "see" the drive and verify it as OK, it should mount.

Regards.

I have had external drives an flash drives do this after not being ejected properly. In every case a restart of the computer and a restart of the drive did the trick.