Is it possible to remount an external drive without restarting?

I'm a video editor .. and have as many as 5 external drives connected to my G5 at all times. Ocassionally I eject one or two hoping to add a little speed to my work, if they are drives I don't need at that time. Sometimes, I need to remount a drive or two. Since they are all connected to each other, I can't simply turn it off and on to remount it.
Also sometimes, I eject the drives still on the desktop and then toggle the drive at the top of the chain to remount them all. Sometimes, this works. Very often, it does not.
I spent MANY years cutting on AVID and I remember that there was a way to remount ejected drives ... maybe, it was part of that software. But I can't remember specifically.
Lately (as in the last couple of days) I'm finding that my drives are very tempermental and tho they are all on and connected when i turn the machine on... a few will not mount. When I open DIsk Utility the unseen drives are not listed. And, in my most recent case, the drives that are unavailable are the drives at the top of the chain. So that tells me the cables are good... since the computer can read the drives at the end of the chain.
My projects are "Ultra Low Budget" and so i am using drives that are available and on sale when the need arises which means they are different manufacturers: Seagate, LaCie, Maxtor (2) and G-Tech (2). 250, 500, 750 Gigs and 1TB (2). All are formatted HFS+ and all have mounted easily at the same time ... until today.
I just checked System Profiler and all the unmounted drives are listed in the "Firewire" profile but as "Unknown". When I click on any --- I can see the various connection speeds but no other information.
I have 2 internal Hard Drives connected -- Serial ATA: 160G and 200G. Both are MacOs 10.4.11
If the external drives were simply ejected --- can I mount them from the Finder?
and in the current situation: Is there any other info I can look up to help figure out why they aren't mounting automatically?
thanks,
ana

The drives that aren't mounting are a G-Tech 1TB FW/eSATA and 2 Maxtor One-Touch 750G.
the G-tech has been connected to my computer using the 800 has been mounting without incident until about 6 hours ago ...output and the Maxtor drives are FW 400. one of the Maxtor drives started acting up 2 days ago but mounted earlier today. The second Maxtor hasn't been included in the chain for months ... its never mounted since I reconnected it this afternoon.
I've experienced the LaCie power source debacle ... I thought it was an isolated problem. But this particular drive has been very reliable.
pardon my ignorance but --- what is a "simple unmount" --- it sounds like its what I should be doing instead of my habit of dragging to the trash ...
Thanks so much for answering my post.

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