OSX won't reboot if external hard drive is connected

Hi I've had my Lacie 500gig Big Disk for a while now, but just recently I've been having reboot problems. I just get the light grey screen at startup, but no Apple logo or anything....just stuck at grey. If I disconnect my external hard drive though, the Mac reboots just fine. Any thoughts on what the problem is? I've run "Verify Disk" from Disk Utility and have no problems. Anything else I can do to diagnose the problem?
FYI, the external drive is partitioned in 2 parts: 250gig for full backup (using .mac Backup) and the other 250gig is where my iTunes Library lives.
Chris

"No repair was neccessary"
Of course I had to quit iTunes before I ran the "Repair Disk", otherwise I get an error saying "could not unmount disk". I assume that's because of iTunes and the iTunes Library being located on the external.

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