External hard drive mounting problems :(

I've been using a Western Digital My Book Pro 500GB drive on my G4 (mirror door) with OS X 10.4.8 via FireWire 400 for a long time now, works great. It looks like this:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=242
When I try to connect it to my MacBook Pro (running OS X 10.4.6) via FireWire 400 or USB 2.0, it recognizes the drive, even mounts it (according to Disk Utility), but it does not show up in Finder. It's totally unusable. The icon in disk utility when the drive is mounted, is not a drive icon. It's just like a blank document icon. When I unmount the drive, it shows the drive icon.
It also does not connect to my wife's PowerBook G4 running OS X 10.4.8.
What I've tried:
- I've tried connecting the drive via USB and Firewire
- I've tried shutting down the laptops, and re-booting.
- I've tried zapping the PRAM on them while booting back up.
- I've tried shutting down the hard drive, turning the drive on, waiting, and then connecting the drives again.
- I've tried to access the drive via terminal, and it does not allow me to CD into the drive. It says "permission denied"
- I've tried verifying the disk
- I've tried repairing the disk.
- I've tried Disk Rescue II 1.1 (which allows me to "recover files" but it's a lengthy process, esp for 250GB I have on it, that you have to restore to another hard drive)
Is this a permissions problem? I don't get how come it works with one of my Macs flawlessly, but the other two doesn't allow me access to it.
MacBook Pro Core Duo, G4 PowerMac, PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Sorry, so much I forgot to include that I've done. I forgot some people are dumb and don't use A/C adapters or use FAT32 drives on there Macs.
I re-formatted it a long time ago using Disk Utility Mac OS X Extended Journaled on my G4 Tower (mirror drive door) with Apple Parition Map. I didn't zero it out, but it was brand new FAT32 drive from Western Digital, and nothing was on it when I reformated it to HFS.
I didn't think the problem was Intel chip related, since it doesn't work on the G4 PowerBook either. I'm unfamiliar with GUID parition map vs APL.
Can Intel Macs read off an APL external drive OK?
I'll look into Disk Warrior and see what it thinks.

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Head_on_a_Stick wrote:
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