One of My External Drive Icons is invisible how do I get it back

Hi.
I have a couple of External (USB and Firewire) drives. Recently my Firewire drive (a WD My Book Studio 1Tb Drive) disappeared from the desktop and finder.
If I look in Disk Utility it is there and I can reveal it or open it from Disk Utility and all the files etc are there and are fine.
I have run a disk repair on the drive and also a permissions repair on the main Mac drive. Any all seems OK.
It does not seem to be locked or anything and as far as I can tell is is working just fine except that because it is invisible in Finder and Desktop it is also invisible to the file open in applications.
I have also tried disconnecting all other hardware except the keyboard and mouse and starting the iMac and then reconnecting the drive to teh firewire port but it simply does not want to appear.
MY OSX is fully patched and totally up-to-date as far as I can tell.
NB I am a relative newbie to the MAC world (and have no Linux/Unix) experience so please make any instructions or advice clear and simple.
Oh and while I write this I am copying everything of the drive to one of my other USB drives (Oh so slow) but at least I will have a backup and I guess I could repartition etc the Firewire drive.
Hmm - just had a thought - one thing I didn't try was connecting the drive via USB as that would also be a check on drive health.. Will do that once all the data is copies off..
Very frustrating. I need to get this icon/drive visible again..
Please help..
Steve

Hi..
After following the above terminal command instructions (and finishing a copy of the critical data just in case). The device never reapeared bit as I was doing a copy of critical data I didn't wanna reboot just in case.
before rebooting and while the copy was occurring I reset the missing drive as my Time Machine Backup Drive (which it was a few months back) - yep time machine could see it. When I did the drive magically reappeared on my Desktop.
It didn't however reappear in Finder.
I then shut down the iMAC and all devices (which I had also been doing earlier to see if it would come back) and low and behold the device is now showing back in my Finder and on the Desktop.
I have rebooted a couple of times and it is still there so looks like the issue is resolved.
Not sure if it was the commands I typed in at terminal or the Time Machine reset but all is OK.
Not sure if Time Machine has screwed around with the setting or had cleaned up a setting or whether the command line instruction worked. But either way I am happy and so far all is looking great..
BTW I have reset my Time Machine back to the other external drive (which is what bought it for) and rebooted and the missing one is still there so that is a relief.
Thanks for the advice...
S.

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