Hard drives appear on desktop, but are inaccessible

Hi.
I recently bought a 17' macbook pro 2.6. I previously had a g4 with four hard drives in it, so I took a couple of them out and put them in external cases. I also have a few external hard drives that were always externals (never in the g4).
The problem I have is that I cannot access one of the formerly internal hard drives. It appears in disk utility and I verified it and there was a minor repair needed (I forget what), so I used the repair function and nothing has changed. The drive icon appears on the desktop, but not under "devices" in the finder window. When I double click on the drive on the desktop, any open finder windows disappear for a few seconds, then reappear, but the drive does not open.
The same thing happens about half of the time with another external drive that was always an external drive. The strange thing is that, even if I can't open the drive, iTunes can access the music files and library on that drive. These drives work fine on my wife's macbook (2.16, running 10.4).
And as if that weren't strange enough, about half of the times that I select "documents" from the "places" menu in the finder window, the same thing happens (finder windows disappear for a few seconds and the documents folder doesn't open), yet I can access my documents folder through my home folder.
The other drive I pulled from my g4 is currently my time machine drive and has no similar problems. Two other external drives also have no problems.
Does this ring any bells?
Thanks,
Bruce

rebuild the directory with Disk Warrior ... works wonders

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