Cannot see my external hard drive on the desktop

Hi,
I am at the tail end of a large documentary project on FCP. Suddenly, this evening my external hard drive (Maxtor One Touch III, Turbo Edition, 1.5TB) becomes sluggish. I shut down (all properly) and restart and the external hard drive is no longer on the desktop (does not mount and cannot be seen anywhere).
I change ports (from one FW400 to another), try connecting to a different Mac (was running on an iMac, try connecting onto a G5) and still cannot see the hard drive. I try connecting using USB2 and still cannot see it on the desktop. I run disk utility and the hard drive shows up in menu on the left, I am able to run "verify disk" as well as "repair disk" - hard drive is fine, no errors no problems. However, I still am not able to access the drive - just does not show up on the desktop or anywhere else where I can get into it. I run the install disk that came with the hard drive (Maxtor) and a backup utility can detect the drive and shows that 1.37 TB of data is safe (so no data loss) but I can still not detect the Hard drive. I also noticed that the light on the hard drive is active indicating that the drive is being accessed.
Problem is simply that both my Macs do not show the drive regardless of how I connect them to the drive (FW400, FW800, USB2 and every port has been tried).
Need help here...please....
I realize this might be more suited for a general OSX or Hard drive issue, but since I have always got great answers from FCP users that I am posting this question here.

Hello all,
Thank you for all your comments and suggestions. I downloaded Disk Warrior 4 from Alsoft - paid $108, followed the instructions to the letter (after reading and rereading sevral times) and ran the utility...it detected the Maxtor HD, pointed out several errors, repaired the errors, and then gave me the option to preview the new and compare to the old HD...this is where things went wrong. There was no HD to be seen - new or old...same problem. HD is not visible on my Finder, on the Disk Warrior Preview or on the desktop. I went ahead and rebuilt the HD...all errors fixed, Disk Warrior states that all is fine and dandy and that my hard drive should be perfect and I can access it...BUT its still not there, I cannot see it on the desktop nor anywhere else.
It shows up in Disk Utility as a page icon - but I cannot access it.
So, unfortunately for me...my problem still remains and I am now out a hundred bucks!
Please, anybody out there - who can give me some direction - I would greatly appreciate it.
BTW, the data is still all there and the light on the front of the drive keeps flashing indicating something is going on...but drive is not mounted, invisible.
I read on the Maxtor packaging something about a built in Maxtor DriveLock - a password protected security measure against theft and loss...could I have inadvertently activated that and that is causing the problem...please advise.

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Cannot see my external hard drive on the desktop

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