Firewire drives refuse to connect

Hi,
I have two acomdata e5 firewire drives, which are refusing to mount. I have not experienced any problems with these daisy-chained drives with my new iMac until tonight when I had to reconnect them.
I just upgraded to 10.5.1 recently, but the drives mounted without any problems. Even tonight, when I brought the drives to a friend's house, they connected to his 8-core Mac without issue. But when I got home, they absolutely refuse to mount on my iMac.
I got one of the drives to appear on my iBook (10.4.9). The other doesn't. In addition to trying the same setup I had previously, I've tried three cords, zapping the pram and nvram, repairing permissions on the HD, performing the daily, weekly, monthly maintenance. I've tried both daisy-chaining and individual connections.
I do not believe there is a problem with the firewire port on the iMac, mainly because when I connect a new iPod with an old iPod firewire cable, the iPod recognizes it cannot connect via firewire. (I would think if the port were dead, the iPod wouldn't react the way it did.)
Are acomdata drivers just terrible drives? Did the 10.5.1 kill their ability to mount? Has anyone experienced similar issues and been able to get these drives to work? What is the trick? (Voodoo?)
Any suggestions or tips are greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Thank you DaddyPaycheck... I tried all those things, but unfortunately learned the drive was evil like Cujo and overloaded the Firewire port. I required a trip to my local Apple Store for a fix.
If anyone else has a similar problem, please be aware that your Firewire may port may have died. Apparently, when I brought my machine in, there were quite a few other iMacs in there with the same problem.
The Mac is now home and happy (and has a new Firewire drive to boot)!

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