Losing external drives whilst autofilling shuffle

Ok, I am not pointing the finger at itunes here yet!
I have 2 external hard drives. 1 - seagate 500mb with my itunes library on it. 2 - WD 1tb drive to backup my internal drive and the seagate. Both drives are always plugged in and always have the same drive letter E: and G:.
on sunday i had filled my shuffle up with songs no problem.Today i plugged my 2gb ipod shuiffle in to autofill from 'music'. It takes forever, and i mean forever to do track selection (at least 4 minutes), then as it starts to add songs, the drive icons start to flash in the tray, it stops with an error saying cannot find songs. lo and behold both external drives have dissappeared from my computer and i can't play any songs in itunes. i unplug and plug them back in. everything is cool, i can play my songs in itunes, i can see files on the backup drive. I plug the shuffle in again, and exactly the same thing happens. so i do it again, and reboot this time, then plug the shuffle in, same thing happens. each time this happens it's not just itunes that can't see the drives. they dissappear from the 'computer' folder, and the wd file manager can't even see it's own backup drive. i keep my machine up to date with software upgrades and am running 10.3.1 of itunes.

Hi Petra,
Thanks for the reply.
My macs at the office only OS 9 classic but I have a studio and all the machines still run on OS 9.2.2. Gave your suggestions a go and I seem to be getting somewhere as the troublesome external HD mounted on the desktop and showed me files that were not retrieved by Data Rescue X (hello - a bit wierd). Will investigate thoroughly as I ran out of time today and will let you know.
Thanks again,
Terry

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Losing external drives whilst autofilling shuffle

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