USB External drive not showing in Finder, or on Desktop

I have two USB external drives from the same manufacturer. One is for regular storage, the second is for Time Machine and movies.
The first one shows everywhere, on the desktop, in finder and in Disk Utility.
The second drive shows in Disk Utility only. However, it is functioning fine with Time Machine. So it is mounted. I have tried several repairs, and it reports no fault found. So it is certainly functioning correctly, but a setting or error in the operating system is not allowing it to be viewed in finder, or on the desktop.
Any suggestions.

Correction: Title should be Firewire External drive not showing in Finder, or on Desktop.

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http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/invisible.html
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http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5751668
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Francine
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Hi,
I have tried 2 USB 2 external drives with my Powerbook. Neither is recognized by the OS so I can't even try to format them. I was able to format the first one on my old 500 mhz Powerbook (Pismo, I guess) running OS 9.2.2 and turning it into a Standard Mac OS, Mac extended and then a DOS drive. None were recognized by the newer Powerbook and once I had formatted the drive to DOS I couldn't format it any other way. That drive, a WD My Passport Essential, was formatted when shipped as a Windows (FAT32?) drive.
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Hi,
I have done an unsafe eject two weeks ago of my external hd. When I try to connect the hd again it doesn't show in finder. I've tried the disk utility but that doesn't work. Are there any other ways to get the hd working again?

I had this problem a few days ago…
I solved using the following steps:
1) Disconnect the external HD from everything, including power.
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3) Reboot the Mac from the Installer disc.
4) Run Disc Utility, first "Repair Disc" then "Repair Permissions" on the internal HD (which actually threw up a total of 4 errors).
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6) Reconnect the external HD.
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However, the next step would have been:
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Here is the results of Terminal Query:
/dev/disk0
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   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
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   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
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USB External drive not showing in Finder, or on Desktop

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