I could use some help with an aggravating situation.

Either my dog or cat tripped themselves over the AC cable providing power to my external hard drive. It now appears that the drive is mounted - permanently - in the state it was in when my pets sabotaged me. When I boot into Jaunty with the drive powered and connected through USB, I can see the drive, named MUSIC. However when I double-click the icon for MUSIC, I receive an error that says:

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Unable to mount MUSIC

DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)
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1.) What causes a Dbus error like this?

2.) Can this issue be resolved?

3.) What must I understand to prevent this from happening again?

Thanks for the help. I have already called Western Digital to fulfil an RMA through their warranty. If I don't have to run data recovery, though, I'd be happy - the drive holds 200 gigs of music... long wait for transfer.