Please Help! - Cannot Access Or See External USB/Firewire Drive

Can anyone help or advise me as I’m really at a loss as how to fix a problem I have with my external hard drive and OX 10.4.6.
I had just completed a fresh install of OS X on my PowerPC iMac G5 using the “Erase & Install” feature.
Everything had gone extremely well, all my applications and settings had been re-set as I normally have them (I made backups) and was able to access my external hard disk, which is a Maxtor OneTouch USB/FireWire 250 GB model.
I then setup a second account for my brother, which I setup as a “Standard” account.
When I then went to access some of the files on my external disk and tried to copy them over to my Desktop, it refused me permission and said that I had to ask the permission of the “Owner’ which it said was Steve (my Brother) which was strange because as I said his account was only setup as a standard account whereas I had an administrator account (and am the main user of the computer).
I went into the Steve's account and looked at the Permissions information using the “Get Info” dialogue box. This showed that the owner was indeed Steve, so I changed it to my Name (Andrew) went back to my account, and found could no longer see the external disk at all.
Returning to Steve’s account I checked the permissions again, and asked it to ignore permissions.
But now I cannot see or access the disk at all in either account, it just does not show up on the desktop or in the Finder Sidebar.
The strange thing is I can see it in “Disk Utility” but when I ask it to either verify or Repair the Disk permissions, it reports that they are all or OK and “no repairs were necessary”.
I have tried connecting the disk with both types of connection - USB2 and the Firewire drive, and the results are exactly the same, the drive is not visible on the Desktop or the Finder Sidebar, but is visible to Disk Utility.
The disk is formatted as a ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive
Can anyone please tell me how I can get my external disk to show on my computer again, as ALL my backup documents and programs are on the disk, and most of the data cannot be replaced.
Would doing a complete fresh install of the OS X operating system fix this as a last resort?
I hope someone can advise, as I really am desperate.
Thanks
Drusus
20' iMac G5 PowerPC (iSight) 1.5GB Ram Mac OS X (10.4.6)
20' iMac G5 PowerPC (iSight) 1.5GB Ram Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Yes, I didn't think it was very good either!
You are correct in I should have said "Repair Disk" - Verify Permissions is not available on the maxtor drive ( it is dimmed) in Repair Disk.
Until now, the drive has worked perfectly, and I did not install any of Maxtors software when I originally connected the drive to this system, I just formatted it as a Mac Extended and it worked great. It was only after the fresh Erase & Install - even then it worked fine. It was only when I created a new account that the problem started.
What I have done is get hold of a demo version of a program called "Mac Drive 6" which allows you to read any Mac formatted disk or drive on a Windows system, - fortunately i still have my Windows XP Pro system which I have also connected to my home network.
So for the next four days (the length of the demo) I can access all of my files on the disk and copy them to my Windows system.
This is really great because I have all my data and images back which were my biggest concern.
I thought I might get another drive anyhow, and when I have everything backed up on a new drive and on the Windows system, I can then reformat the Maxtor drive and start afresh with it.
Thanks for all your help anyhow.

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Please Help! - Cannot Access Or See External USB/Firewire Drive

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