External hard drive woes

Hoping maybe one of the techie folks here will have some sense of what to do about this; I have a call in to Tekserve but who knows how long they'll take to call me back...

So my Powerbook's logic board was recently fried; Tekserve was able to sae the hard drive and they put it in an enclosure for me so it's basically an external drive now. I have a "new" (used, but new to me) Mac Mini, so I hooked the "new" (old) external drive up to it via USB. The light on the external drive comes on, and it pops up on my desk top, but when I try to open it up I get the endless spinning beach ball and I can hear the drive spinning and stopping in its little case.

Am I doing something wrong, ya think?

I'd try plugging it into a different machine. Preferably a windows or linux box. If that's not practical, I'd try looking for it in a hardware browser to see what's being detected, whether it needs a special driver the old mac doesn't have, whether it can be mounted from /dev, etc.

Any idea what file system is on it? If it's NTFS for example, Mac OS X won't be able to write, just read, and if your system insists on being able to write, it could spin forever. If it's FAT32, there might be other hassles depending on the size of the drive and the size of your files.

Mount the drive. Open "Disk Utility," choose your volume at the left and try repairing the disk (click "repair disk").

If this doesn't work, you'll probably need to get a hold of a program called "Disk Warrior" that can pull data from drives with damaged directories.

Good luck.