External USB Hard Drive will not stay mounted upon restart

Hello everyone,

I've scoured the net for hours trying to find a solution to this problem with no luck. Hopefully the bright minds in this forum will know what's going on. My Iomega USB 2.0 hard drive mounts fine when I turn it on while my macbook pro is up and running. If I restart the computer, the drive will no longer be mounted when OSX boots back up. To get the drive to mount, I need to turn off the drive, wait a few seconds, and turn it back on.

This is very irritating because 1) it's a hassle. and 2) the drive remains spinning full speed until I turn it off and back on. Somehow the spin-down feature does not kick in when the drive is turned on but not mounted. This means that if I restart and forget to power cycle the drive, it will continue spinning for hours and hours (getting very hot in the process).

Anyone have any advice? My other external hard drive (Western Digital) does not have this problem, if I restart the computer the orange hd icon is still there when osx comes back up. This problem occurs in both OSX and Windows via boot camp. Does this mean it's a problem with the drive? Is there any way to fix it?

Thanks for your help... I'll be greatly indebted to anyone who can figure this out.