Mounting an external drive in Terminal?

Hi,
I've been trying to find the commands to use to mount an external firewire drive from the Terminal. The external drives I use to back up my laptop have stopped mounting in the Finder. (The drives are fine: I can mount them on my office computer. Also, USB drives work fine.) System Profile can "see" the drives, as can Terminal (ls /Volumes), but Disk Utility cannot.
I am loathe to send my computer back to Apple (they think my FireWire port has gone bad), but will if I need to. But first, it occurred to me to see if there's a Terminal command I can use to see if I can get the disk mounted. I've searched and searched and know there's a "mount" command but am unsure what might come after that. I'm pretty sure Apple Support wouldn't take people into the Terminal but I don't mind trying to use it. (I've only used it before to run maintenance scripts.) Any ideas?
Thank you for any advice.
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)

In the Terminal, with df you get a list of connected
disks. With sudo diskutil mount disk mount this.
Hmm, I'm a little confused. i can't seem to find my FireLite drive usign "df". All I get is stuff i can't understand. I do see the FireLite disk when I type "ls /Volumes". I can't tell from your post what is an actual command to be typed into terminal and what is simply a general instruction. Sorry to be so lacking in background here.
Do I type "sudo diskutil mount FireLite," or "sudo diskutil mount disk" and then some other command? Neither works.
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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