Help lost firewire drive

[ms]

I can't get my Western Digital 100 gig firewire drive to mount.  Disk 
Utility can see the drive but not the volume.   I can't lose what's on 
it so I can't initialize as it asks to.  I just upgraded to 10.2.3 
yesterday and now for the first time in nearly a year with OS X I have 
a disk problem.  I can't get Disk warrior 2.1 or Drive 10 to see it.  
After losing the drive, I also got my first kernel panic.  Can there be 
a connection, how do I fix the directory on the   lost drive?