Firewire HD won't mount

We have two macs. We recently restored our MacBook from a hard drive error, and we have a lot of important stuff saved on a My Book external HD. Unfortunately, it doesn't mount on either the MacBook (running OS 10.5.5) or our iBook (running 10.4). It appears in the system profiler but not in either Finder or Disk Utility. Does anyone know what might be the problem, or better yet, the solution?
Thanks in advance!

See the following:
FireWire Issues- Drives disappearing or unmountable - corrupt volumes - solutions;
What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire or USB device;
LaCie's Mike Mihalik checked in with some tips about dealing with FireWire failures:
Seems like the FireWire issue needs to be revisited quite often. Here is my often repeated suggestion which appears to clear up many FireWire issues: reset the FireWire ports. Panther has a Finder Preference to show mounted volumes on the Desktop. You must set this for mounted drives to be visible. Please follow these instructions to reset your FireWire port. Here is a summary:
1. shut down and disconnect all external drives and peripherals ; make sure nothing is connected to the FireWire ports.
2. use Apple Disk Utility to repair permissions on your internal boot drive.
3. shut down and disconnect the AC power from the computer as well as the drives; if laptop, also remove battery; let sit unpowered and unconnected for 15 minutes.
4. reconnect AC power to only the computer (battery too if laptop)
restart computer.
5. verify that FireWire ports are visible within Apple System Profiler.
6. reconnect FireWire drive (only one); refresh window within Apple System Profiler to rescan the FireWire bus; confirm that drive is visible.
7. confirm drive is OK by using Apple Disk Utility and apply First Aid
repeat for other drives, one at a time.
And, you can try using Disk Utility to repair the drive:
Repairing the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger and Leopard.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now restart normally.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior (4.0 for Tiger, and 4.1 for Leopard) and/or TechTool Pro (4.6.1 for Leopard) to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

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