Mac newbie cannot access Mac Mini's Iomega 200gb external firwire drive

After a power problem - I powered on my Mac Mini to find no external firwire drive
I have my data backed up - so I reinstalled OSX
I am now at the stage where Disk Utility
can see the disk,
I ran disk repair - it said all ok
but no icon on desktop (I am logged in as Admin)
I plugged in my work usb disk its icon appears ok
the firewire reports its mount point: /Volumes/Iomega HDD
when I safari that it returns "you dont have permission"
but when I safari my usb drive I get to see its contents
it looks like I (admin) dont have permission on the disk - and "repair disk permissions" is not clickable
Its a step forward but I'm stumped - on the plus side I am learning OSX's quirks having been a micro$oft user for so long and was pleasantly surprised with os reinstall ease.
also finder finds all my stuff (but its in ghost font - unclickable ! )
is there some utility to force admin permission?
or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
I also am not too worried about reformatting the disk, as I have 99.9% of the data backed up (the only thing I thank my years of Micro$oft use for lol)
however a part of me thinks a reformat will give me a blank disk - with no permission
help!

Do you have access to another Mac? It would be helpful to try the external drive with another computer to make sure the problem isn't with your Mini (it probably isn't, just good to eliminate that as a variable). I don't know Dublin, but surely there's a Mac retailer somewhere that has a few demo machines out.
Alternately, you can create a new admin user on your Mini, log into that user, and try accessing the drive there. This would show you if it's a problem with your main account or specifically permissions.
You should also check your Finder prefs and make sure you have removable drives set to show up on the Desktop. Since you just did a clean install and this is the default (I think), this shouldn't be a problem, but it's worth checking.
If none of these steps yielded positive results, the next thing I would do is run Disk Warrior. This is arguably the best disk repair app for Mac OS X; it's definitely my favorite. Your external drive could have a corrupted directory or some other problems that Disk Utility isn't seeing/fixing for whatever reason.
If none of this works, reformatting the disk is the last step. As long as the drive itself isn't physically damaged, and the problem isn't something on the Mini itself, reformatting should fix the problem completely. And since it sounds like you have your data backed up, maybe you should just skip to this step and be done with it.
Good luck.

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Mac newbie cannot access Mac Mini's Iomega 200gb external firwire drive

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