external drive not being read after sleep mode

I have a WD 1TB external MyBook drive that has problems after my laptop comes back from sleep mode. I don't want it on all the time so I'll use my computer (xp sp3), then put it in sleep mode and come back the next day. I plug in the external drive via firewire 400 and the drive will spin, but not read. XP knows it's there because it shows up in the remove hardware button and I can hear it spinning, but the drives (4 partitions) won't show up. A couple of times I rebooted and it worked then, but it's really annoying to reboot.

Yesterday I rebooted and plugged it in and it still wouldn't read so then I unplugged the power from the drive and plugged everything in and it worked. I'm afraid it's getting to the point where I'll have to restart and unplug and that's crazy. Before putting the computer to sleep I safely remove hardware and the next time I open the computer it doesn't want to be read.

Can I force XP to read it somehow without rebooting?

Thanks.

 

Some external drive enclosures disable access to the drives if they do not sense a connected computer after a specified time and will not re-enable it until the drive power is disconnected and reconnected. Perhaps this is case here.