Fcp will not open up for me

I have the FCP 5 suite, a Power MacG5, OSX 10.4.4, 1 gig of DDR2 SDRAM, and a Lacie external hard drive with 250 Gig of memory.

Last night I captured approximately 60 minutes of Firewire DV-NTSC video to my external drive using Capture Now with 5 time code breaks creating new master clips each time.

Tonight when I double click to open my project file from my external hard drive and when I double click FCP in the dock of my desktop on my boot drive, the FCP window appears, loads the FCP categories across the top of the screen and then the external hard drive literally makes a stuttering buzz sound and then the application closes, leaving me with just the Finder application open. In other words, FCP will not open under any circumstance -- meanwhile, other files on my external hard drive open without a hitch.

Can you please recommend a way to open FCP under these circumstances or a way to address the problem?

I have already reassigned the scratch disk to the fcp files folder on the Internal hard drive to bypass the external drive, and this is not fixing the problem.

Thanks in advance to whoever can suggest a solution.

To test out once and for all whether it's the drive that's causing the problem, turn it off and unplug it completely from the computer, then launch FCP by clicking on the dock. (Single-click suffices on the Dock; double-clicking is a waste.) If FCP can launch, that means the computer's FireWire communication with the drive is causing FCP to hang up.

If you say FCP will not launch at all, how did you reset the Scratch Disk?

Did you format the drive properly? Run Disk First Aid and DiskWarrior on the drive.

If it's not the drive that's the problem, try dumping preferences and repairing permissions.