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...