So i'll try to make this short. I backed up my laptop onto an external hard drive. The external has 2 partitions hfs and fat32. The hfs is where I backed up all my data. I reformat my laptop and when I plug in my external drive to put my data back on, only the fat 32 partition shows up. I go into disk utility to try and repair the disk but it gives me a "invalid sibling link" error and will not fix it. I try to mount it and it doesnt mount either. I took it to the mac store and they told me if they used disk warrior that it may make things worse. I then took it to a recovery place and they wanted to charge hundreds of dollars that i just dont have. I am pretty sure all that happened was i unpluged or turned off the external before I "ejected" the drive and something got screwed up. I know there cannot be any physical damage. do you guys think that disk warrior will be able to fix the drive or am I taking a big chance at screwing things up even more? or is there anythign else I can try?

If it was me, I'd give DiskWarrior a try.

Are you trying to mount the drive in a different (ie earlier) version of MacOS ? I've had that prob before, mostly with OS9 not mounting OSX disks because I forgot to add an OS9 driver during format..it can happen with early versions of OSX too, tho. Unplugging it before unmounting will likely only render a drive unusable if it's scsi..if you were using usb or firewire the disk should be ok, i would think. IIRC, Disk Warrior usually creates a virtual drive of all the contents of the selected drive...before it does a repair, after it builds one up, you can copy files off of it. That's assuming it will repair an unmounted drive, since I've never tried that I don't know if it does...