FW mounting problem after improper put-away 10.1/10-.2

[Terry Harrison]

My OS 10.1 system got locked up and I had to do the evil unplug of the 
machine to get it back.

The system is up and working great, but now I can't mount my Firewire 
drive.
I couldn't "eject" it properly before (similar to a power outage) but 
need get it to mount now.

I looked at Disk Utility on 10.1 and saw a B-tree error, that would 
come and go, if I repeatedly clicked "repair"
I checked out the disk on a 10.2 system and was able to repair the 
B-tree error but still couldn't mount the disk.
It was "standard" formatted.

OK ... so for this, I've given up on recovering the data and am trying 
to reformat the disk (on 10.2) to extended format.
Now it seems the Apple Disk Utility is stuck in the "Preparing drive 
... unmounting old volumes" phase.  The blue bar is still animated 
"flowing" , but seems to be stuck 3/4 the way though the process.

Checked the processes using the "top" command in the Terminal.  Disk 
Utility is not locked up, as I see fluctuations in its usage of the 
CPU.  Still... nothing has happened for a several minutes.

GOAL:  I'm laying down lots of DV video to the drive to edit later.  I 
need to have the drive be a reliable archive and not need to be 
reformatted or lose data in case it gets unmounted improperly.

Any suggestions on what to do, ideas, experiences would be helpful.