[Ti] External Hard Drive Problem (Extra-nasty)

[~flipper]

This evening I was rifling through large pdf docs in Acrobat pro, and something went awry, at first seeming to only affect Acro, and the Finder, but in the course of things, the UIServer crashed.

Bottom line, besides somehow destroying my Eudora settings file and its backup (and who knows what else, I'm in no mood to look, yet), was this: 

My 160 GB LaCie external drive (800 Firewire) is not mounting. I did a disk repair, after a file check, ran permissions, booted from DiskWarrior, nada. DiskWarrior just went into endless progress wheel (pizza wheel) and stayed there, as it was "scanning for drives"... that's not good, no doubt.

Booted from the OS Installer, no go on scan difference. Only my internal partitions showed up.

Strange data: 

-  The drive registers in Apple System Profiler (accurately)
-  Peripheral Vision shows it as present when the cable is plugged in, and unplugged (also a valid ID)
-  I got a warning when I unplugged the cable (The old Warning: Possible data loss if you don't disconnect this device...etc, blah blah)

I did a DiskWarrior graph of the Directory on my internal drive and it shows some serious crappiness in the early sectors on the drive (that can't be good), I haven't actually run DW on the internal yet, due to the fact that it bogged down at Step 5 (Locating data on the drive), for 45 minutes, and I had email to send, resumes to mail, etc.

When I plug another smaller external firewire drive (daisy-chained) into the LaCie...the other external registers with Peripheral Vision, and mounts as usual, so the cables and pass-through inside the LaCie are good.

Anybody have a low-budget suggestion, before this goes to what looks like an all-nighter with DiskWarrior? Is it possible that Directory corruption on the internal drive could single out/fail to assign a mount point for one particular external drive? Because the mount point must change between reboots, shutdowns, and restarts, i can't see how an addressing problem could do this.

very spooked over here, so any clues will help, thanks
brian s