External drive doesn't show up.

I have a LaCie mini hub external drive that I use as a backup drive for my Mac Mini. Well, the drive in the Mini died. I took the LaCie to the Apple store with the Mini and they confirmed that the external drive was working OK, by either USB or Firewire. They kept the Mini for warranty repair and I'm still waiting for it to return.
I get home and attach the LaCie drive to my ibook, but the ibook doesn't see it. It doesn't show up with system profiler, so I can't even try running Disk Utilities on it. The hub function of the LaCie seems to work OK, but that's probably not surprising, and has little to do with the hard disk inside it.
The Mini is a intel duo core running OS X 10.4.8
The ibook is a G4 running OS X 10.3.9
The LaCie is 250 GB, formatted using HFS+, according to the manual.
Mostly I just want to reassure myself that the backup is intact on the LaCie drive. Any thoughts?
ibook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Mostly I just want to reassure myself that the backup is intact on the LaCie drive. Any thoughts?
You might have a look at the demo version of iPartition.
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php
The demo won't write any changes, so hopefully it is a safe way to confirm that you still can access your drive -- though it won't actually let you get the contents, since it is a partitioning utility.
(If it were me, I'd leave well enough alone until your fixed Mini returns.)

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