undetectable hard drive

Hi. I hope someone here can help me out. My girlfriend has a powerbook, G4 OS x10.4 & a macbook G5 OS X 10.5.8 Plus a 500g Maxtor external hard drive. The problem we have is that neither laptop will recognise the external drive. The drive will power up and spin, it shows up in System Profiler but there is no desktop icon or icon in the My
Computer window. Neither of us know how Macs work so could someone please tell me how to access this drive.
Many thanks.

Can Disk Utility find it?

is the Maxtor external HDD formatted FAT32?

If it's Windows NTFS that could be the problem...although Mac OS X 10.3 and later should at least read it.

Edited by 4M2 (Sat 22-Sep-12 17:14:27)

I seem to remember it never worked on my windows pc so I guess it is Mac whatever. Journal is it?

Hi. Yes, finally found disk utility and, yes, the disk is there. Ive never used this utility so any advice? Many thanks

Worth running the First Aid options - go straight to repair rather than checking first.

Then reformat as HFS+ (Journaled) - don't go case sensitive.

See what happens...

(I am assuming there is nothing on the drive obv).

Do you have show External disks selected in Finder Preferences?

screenshot

Thanks.
I ran repair but I got an 'invalid node structure', filesystem repair failed.
There is data on the drive but given the above error Im guessing it is all lost and a reformat, if possible, is the only option?
Cheers

Hmm. Doesn't look good

Have a look here: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070204... (note that these assume it is the boot disk causing issues - you don't need to, obv)

Also, if you don't already own it, get a copy of Disk Warrior - is worth every penny and might just salvage your data.

Thanks. I didnt know about that but yes, it is ticked.
Cheers