USB and Firewire drives not recognized.

My Mid 2011 Mac Pro has stopped recognizing external drives on both the USB and Firewire ports. I don't suspect it's a 100% hardware issue completely since I was able to put my Mac Pro into target mode and connect it to my MBP. When I open up the Disk Utiities it sees an external drive (either USB or Firewire) but will list it as something like "disk4s3" or some variation and not the original name I had assigned the drive. Also the drives in Disk Utilities can be mounted and only has the option to erase or partition. Has anyone had similar issues and resovled them? Any advice would be helpful! Does this point to a complete computer failure soon? Scared!