Diskwarrior Help

An external Harddrive suddenly stopped mounting yesterday. I have some very very important media on it which cant be lost.

At first my imac (specs below) wouldnt see it at all, it wouldnt appear on my desktop or in disc utility or diskwarrior. A few panicked hours later I ran diskwarrior again and it found the drive - overnight I left it to rebuild only to wake up to Diskwarrior hanging on Step 1.

So I have now got hold of the latest version of DW just in case that will help and have restarted the rebuild process (again the External HD wasnt seen by my imac until I ran DW)

Its currently again stuck at step 1.

I was wondering if anyone had a simailar problem to this before, what does it mean? Is it worth me leaving it at step one for days on end (the data really is that important) and if there is anything else I could do if DW fails to move on from step 1??

Specs for External HD

Name : Seagate FreeAgent Go Media
Type : Disk

Partition Map Scheme : Unformatted
Disk Identifier : disk1
Media Name : Seagate FreeAgent Go Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : USB
USB Serial Number : 2GE25JB4
Device Tree : /PCI0/EHC2@1A,7/@5:0
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
Location : External
Total Capacity : 465.8 GB (500,107,862,016 Bytes)
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 0

Imac


Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac7,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM71.007A.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.21f4

 

thanks miles.

Just got back and its still hanging at step1.

Im going to quit and take it to some friendly people at a mac specialists near me.

FYI I took a sample of the Disc Warrior process in activity monitor and it spurted this out -

Sampling process 450 for 3 seconds with 1 millisecond of run time between samples
Sampling completed, processing symbols...
Analysis of sampling DiskWarrior (pid 450) every 1 millisecond
Call graph:
2375 Thread_2507
2375 0x2015
2375 0x20ee
2375 0x27c2
2375 0x141cf
2375 0x16267
2375 0x16136
2375 0x14313
2375 0x18018
2375 0x17e41
2375 0x38b28
2375 0x33d3a
2375 0x33b6b
2375 0x41e14
2375 0x41c66
2375 0x4156d
2375 0x78d7a
2375 0x75347
2375 0x75201
2375 0x1b726
2375 CFMessagePortSendRequest
2375 CFRunLoopRunInMode
2375 CFRunLoopRunSpecific
2375 mach_msg
2375 mach_msg_trap
2375 mach_msg_trap

Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):

Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
mach_msg_trap 2375
Sample analysis of process 450 written to file /dev/stdout





If anybody out there can offer advice or help that would be great - I can't start over as the media on the drive is from a whole day of a film shoot and we really can't reshoot!