DiskWarrior

I got it to boot up OK from an external firewire drive I have, but Disk Utility said it couldn't fix the drive and Diskwarrior also said it was irreparable. ...

will not start up from the DiskWarrior disc. ...

but I bought the thing to store my data when I sold my previous machine. I need the space since my new machine has a smaller hard drive. Testing the drive with DiskWarrior has never uncovered any errors, even with the improper unmounts. ...

OK so now i know that things are going against me.. downloaded and purchased diskwarrior but i cant boot from the disk. ...

Try booting to the installer and then going into disk utility. From the installer you will be given the option to repair the volume. If disk utility fails to repair the volume you may need something stronger like DiskWarrior.

The only danger arises when you power off or disconnect the drive while the system is running. In order to do this safely, you must manually eject the drive (simply drag the icon to the trash, or highlight and press command-e). Once the disk icon disappears, it's safe to disconnect and/or power off. If you do not "cleanly" eject the drive first, you risk directory damage...

First thing: shutting down and/or restarting (via the Apple Menu) "cleanly" unmounts drives. You do not need to manually eject any external drives before doing either of those, as the system does it for you. There is absolutely no danger in shutting down and/or restarting while external drives are connected as far as unmounting goes. As long as these procedures are done...

Sorry it's been so long in checking back. My apologies. To update my dilemma, the DiskWarrior worked well. I got a lot of "red ink" messages but I was able to preview the data on the external drive. ...

Could just possibly be the directory structure of the drive is corrupt from sudden power downs or not always being ejected properly. Diskwarrior is going to be your best bet at this point. ...

I tried DiskWarrior to recover the data, but it only works in NTFS. I am looking for a way to try and fix the drive and retrieve the data using a mac rather than a PC. ...