The problem arose when I detached the video camera, but still had a Firewire cable attached to the secondary port on the HD. The next day, not realizing that there would be an issue, and frankly forgetting that the cable was still attached, I attempted to power up and access the HD. OS X 10.2.3 could find the drive but couldn't mount it and wanted to initialize it. "This is a problem," I thought. I had a lot of information I needed on that drive. I tried to access the HD several times, trying other things but nothing seemed to work. I booted into OS9 to see if it might be an OS X issue but the same thing happened: No external HD.
Then it occurred to me – didn't I still have that movie camera cable hooked to the drive. I pulled the cable off and OS9 gave me an icon. I booted into OSX and was able to see and access the drive with no difficulty. So, the moral is: make sure the Firewire chain is terminated with a device!

