Hard drive not recognized as a separate hard drive

I have a problem that has stumped me, Apple support, and the hard drive support folks.
When I connect my external hard drive(via firewire) to my eMac, it mounts and the icon shows up on the desktop. However, when I click on the external hard drive icon it appears to be a mirror image of my internal drive. What I get is a finder page with all my data from the internal drive available. This happens immediately after I connect the hard drive. It acts identical to my internal drive. If I delete something in my internal drive it is deleted in the external drive and vice versa. When I look under disk utilities both drives are listed and the external drive has the whole drive "available" (500GB). So it appears that the eMac does not recognize the external drive as a separate drive. I have tried a LaCie drive and currently a G-drive with the same results. I tried the G-drive on a friends iBook and it works like it should - showing up blank until data is dragged into it. I'm thinking there must be a setting somewhere on my eMac that is not allowing me to attach an external drive and have it work. I have Time Machine turned off and locked so I know it is not interfering.
Any ideas?

Did you try Király's suggestion about logging on using a different user account? If necessary, create a new, troubleshooting-only administrative user account (so that all user preferences are freshly created from defaults). If the test user account behaves as expected, that points to a user preference (or possibly the Desktop). Moving the preference file Király mentioned to the Trash or a holding folder, then logging out and back, would be a good start.
I don't know if 10.5 makes enough changes to affect preference checking tools from earlier OS versions; To check your user preferences (.plist) files in Terminal, copy and paste the following and press return:
find ~/Library -name '*.plist' -exec /usr/bin/plutil -lint {} \;
You can also download Preferential Treatment (which provides a GUI front end to the plutil command).

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Checked the cable and newer ipod shuffle works fine.
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I have crazy solution to format it to FAT 32, it work a couple times on my several MAxtor, and Western Digital HD. But this is the last resort and if you are not handy and familiar, don't do it.
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http://www.bootdisk.com/
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Type :           Partition
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          Supports Journaling :           Yes
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Hi,
Whether the hard disk is recognized in BIOS?
Connect it to another computer to see if it could be recognzied incase the cause is the disk itself. Also please check if it is really a RAID instead of a single hard disk - a single disk should be recognized directly while RAID cannot be recognized until
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Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and un-mark them if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact [email protected]

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Have a nice day!

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Care to share which OS you are using?
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Hard drive not recognized as a separate hard drive

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