Can't Open Maxtor OneTouch External Drive

[BettaBee]

With great humiliation I admit defeat. I can not, for the life of me, open my external hard drive attached to my Mac Mini (Tiger 10.11). Been working fine for about a year. It is a 500GB USB driven OneTouch and has about 300Gb of work saved on it. Suddenly, no drive appears on my Desktop. It shows up in Disk Utilities and can be mounted and unmounted. It shows as /Volumes/Maxtor/ in Disk Utilities. A search in finder in Go to Folder for /Volumes/ reveals an Alias of "Maxtor" that I can pull up in Get Info as a "Wheel" group file, but can not change anything like permissions, etc. Tried authorizing permissions in Terminal - no luck. Does not show up with a Terminal ls search. Tried disconnecting and reboot umpteen times. Tried plugging into various USB ports. Tried on my MacBook Pro - same.

The Maxtor drive is live and whirring with the lights on. I am about to go to DiskWarrior and have at it. Any ideas would be most thankfully appreciated.

 

[DICKSTER]

Betta--Have you tried> In disk utility>Remount disc? and repair disk?
Dickster-----------------------------------

 

[BettaBee]

Dickster,

Yes, I can mount and unmount the disk. I have also verified the disk and repaired the disk. I used DiskWarrior to go in and fix directories on the disk yesterday. (DW read all the files on the external drive and verified they are intact -- thank God. Now to get to them.)

I have restarted the computer after each of these exercises once I determined that the drive did not appear on the desktop or via Go To Folder searches. I have also disconnected the external drive and started the Mini without it and then plugged it in hoping it would get recognized. No luck. Very baffling.

I am stuck on what to try next. I am not giving up!