Backup Disk Failed - How to Repair?

[thewocky]

For about eight months now I've been using an external 1TB hard drive (OWC Mercury Elite Pro) as my Time Machine backup disk. This morning I discovered a couple of important files are corrupt and won't open, so I turned to my trusty Time Machine to recover them. Only to get a warning that "The storage location for Time Machine backups can't be found." I noticed the drive wasn't mounted. So I went into Disk Utility: both Verify Disk and Repair Disk commands result in these errors (in red, after "Checking Catalog file.":

Invalid sibling link
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

I've tried mounting the hard drive and running Disk Utility from two machines (both running 10.5.5) connected with both Firewire 800 & 400 and get the same results. Any clue as to what's going on?

I tried TechTool>Volume Structures Repair, and got the error "Failed. Bitmap Mismatch. (-90)" I tried AppleJack, but that only seems to look at internal drives. I have an old version of DiskWarrior (3.0.2) that I'm afraid is too old and might cause more trouble than it's worth. Any other software that might help diagnose/repair this problem?

Thanks in advance...

[Doctor X]

Do not know for sure, but DW is actually pretty good about allowing upgrades. If you have the time--you can wait the weekend--give them a call.

The reason is you can use DW to "take a picture" of your HD-which may allow you to find the files.

--J.D.