FW drive freezes OS X 10.4.9

Several years ago I bought a Neptune firewire drive from OWC to use with an older Mac running OS 8.6 and 9.1. It worked very well with that machine.
I retired the computer but had a lot of files on that disk that I'd like to access from my G5 powermac running OS 10.4.9.
I didn't see any indications in the user info that came with the drive or on OWC's website that this would be a problem. But when I plugged it into the G5 it mounts, yet when I click on the icon it freezes the computer. The only way I can unmount it is to restart the G5. (The G5 has been giving me no other problems, before or since.)
When I first tried this I could hear the disk being accessed and I thought that this might be spotlight cataloging the files so I waited a few minutes until it stopped. But then when I tried opening it - crash.
So, afraid that I may have lost data on the Neptune, I hooked it up to the old computer again and I was relieved to see that it still worked there and the files seemed to be intact.
I wrote to OWC customer support and although I've been happy with their products, I found them less than helpful in this matter.
Several questions:
Does anyone know why this is happening?
How can I get this drive to work with the G5?
If it freezes the computer how can I reformat or do anything with it now?
I've perused the forums about this and although I see problems with other firewire drives not mounting, I haven't found anything like this (mounting but freezing) or other references to Neptune drives.

Don't have a clue. Did you run Disk First Aid on the FWHD when hooked up to the old computer and check its status? Repair permissions and the disk? Rather than trying to figure out what's going on, I suggest hooking it up to the old computer and doing that first. If it passes, check its format—should be HFS+—drag&drop the files onto the old computer, erase and format the FWHD, drag&drop the files back, and see if it'll mount and open on the G5.
These might give you some solutions:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20041221081432908 and
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88338

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