Directory damage

[Mary Lynch]

Can any one suggest a way around directory damage without data recovery. 
The material on the firewire disk that went down is very important to 
me, and I can't get the disk to mount.  A friend looked it over, tried 
to get it to work, and said that my directory was bad.  I recovered and 
repaired another disk with a bad directory, but I lost all of the data 
on it.
Thank you.
Mary