External HD doesn't appear in Finder but does in Disk Utility?

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I'm not exactly sure what happened, but while I was trying to erase my external HD using Disk Utility I got some sort of error and now I can't seem to do anything with it. I tried using the encrypted, journaled option and after a few seconds an error flashed on the screen, which I didn't really see, and then it flashed back to the main screen for Disk Utility. Now it shows this:

in Disk Utility, with Untitled being the external HD (I'm assuming). However, when I select it my only choices are First Aid and Partition, so I can't really do anything with it. First aid says it checks out OK. "Untitled" does not show up at all in the Finder:


I'm not sure where to go from here. I really need to back up onto this dang thing because I just got a shiny new SSD that I'd really like to install, but I can't until I have a backup of the old one. I also don't know what kind of info might be needed, so I'm just going to post what I think might be useful and go from there. Thanks for any help y'all can give me.

System Software Overview:
System Version: OS X 10.8.5 (12F2518)
Kernel Version: Darwin 12.6.0
Boot Mode: Safe
Secure Virtual Memory: Enabled

Hardware Overview:
Model Name: MacBook
Model Identifier: MacBook5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MB51.007D.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.32f8

Disk Utility ver. 13 (450)
External HD - Maxtor 320GB USB
 
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Either the drive has some "software" issues, or is just getting bad. Too bad you don't have a more robust disk repair/maintenance program like Disk Warrior or Tech Tool Pro, as they could be handy in this case.

In any event, there should be a Recovery Partition on your internal drive. To boot from it, hold down the Command and R keys as your machine boots up. It will be somewhat slow, but eventually it will come up. This link describes what one can do with the software on that partition:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

What you need to do is select Disk Utility from there, and do a Verify and Repair Disk at the Volume (ie, top) level, that is, for the disk "name" untitled. Hopefully, that will solve your issue.
 

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