TM drive doesn't always mount on iMac startup

Hi,
TM seems to work well most of the time. Once in a great while though, TM drive doesn't mount on iMac startup, and if I don't notice the missing icon on the desktop, backups don't happen.
TM drive is a Seagate Free Agent USB 500G. It's connected directly, not through a hub. The drive has no power switch, so I leave it alone -- out of sight, out of mind.
Two questions:
1. Is is something that I am doing or the way I'm set up that causes this infrequent failure?
2. When I notice the missing connection, what's the best way to get the TM drive reconnected? What I do now to reconnect is: shut down the computer, pull the power plug on the TM drive, restart the computer, plug the drive back in.
Your thoughts appreciated.
Jerry

My understanding is that the disk doesn't mount, ie not visible to the system. In that event I can't see that changing Time Machine's disk allocation will achieve anything. It's a hardware initialisation issue.
If the disk isn't mounted (personally I'd check System Profiler to be absolutely sure) then there can't be any transfers going on so you should be safe to just unplug, pause to let the electronics settle and then plug back in. If that works, and the problem is rare, that might be the best way to go, although it might be that there is some problem with the drive which is not good if you are relying on it for back up. I don't know enough about hard drives to comment on that aspect (maybe it's just a driver issue?).

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