Lost my external hard drive and now Snow Leopard can't find it

I was doing some maintenance with Onyx (repair permissions, clean caches) and something happened to my external hard drive that I use for Time Machine. Snow Leopard no longer recognizes that the drive exists. It is not listed as a drive in the Mac HD window and is not listed in the Time Machine preference window as a choice for use by Time Machine.
I have already tried the following: (1) unplugged the external drive and replugged it into the back of my iMac (2) restarted the iMac both with and without the external drive plugged in (3) shut down the iMac and restarted both ways (4) pulled the plug on the iMac and restarted. Nothing works and the drive remains unrecognized. In all the attempts, I can feel that the external drive is spinning and it is still warm to the touch. It appears to be working.
Can anyone help?

I am also having similar issues with my Mac Pro (OSX 10.6.3). I have been using a WD external HD for months now with my Time Machine, and I just today realized the drive is not showing anywhere on my Mac and the last backup was on 4/4/2010 (connected via firewire 400 port). Additionally, my old Maxtor drive I previously (not currently) used for Time Machine was also not shown anywhere. I then connected the Maxtor via a USB port instead of firewire, and it will now show in my Disk Utility but will not mount. I ran a "verify disk" on the Maxtor drive and no errors were found. The WD disk cannot be found even in Disk Utility. Getting nervous about my backups.

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