Time Machine suddenly can't find network drive (WD MyBook)

I have a Mac Mini running OS X 10.5, with a 2 TB external USB drive (Western Digital MyBook) which my family uses for Time machine backups. It has worked fine for months. Suddenly, about 3 weeks ago but unnoticed until today, my wife's MacBook (OS X Lion) stopped backing up, complaining that the backup volume could not be found. It says her last baclup was 20 days ago.
"That's odd," I said, "I haven't been getting any errors..." and then I looked at Time Machine on my MacBook Pro (Lion), and discovered my last successful backup was 15 days ago.
Both of us were getting "The backup volume is unavailable."
Sure enough, I found myself unable to mount the two external USB drives on the Mini from my MacBook Pro. I could mount the internal hard drive, but couldn't see the external drives even when connecting as admin.
So I rebooted the Mini, and now I can mount the drive via Finder, but Time Machine still can't fint the volume. If I click Setect Disk, all I get is "Set Up Other Time Capsule." No network drives appear at all. I rebooted my MacBook Pro, and now Time Machine has turned itself off, and I still can't see the Mini's external drives in Time Machine, although I can access them just fine in Finder.
The Mini itself backs up to the Green Drive with no problem.
I've run DU and clicked Repair Disk. No problems were found. Repair Permissions is greyed out.

Apologies for the typos above. Also, it's apparently a MyBook Elite. So says the latest firmware updater from WD, which I ran to make sure my drive firmware was up to date.
I'm also going to try upgrading the Mini to Lion. Will post the results.

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