Scoobes on 31 October 2009
Another thing I just thought of is that it could be your PSU is unable to supply power to the external HDD anymore, although this does seem a bit odd and unlikely, my brother's PSU did start to conk out like this. If other components start to behave erratically in the future and the PC has a tough time turning on then that would point to the PSU. Unlikely but possible.
I still say you try to format a HDD into NTFS, although it would mean having to backup your data first.
