Time machine hard drive corruption

I was running out of space on my external hard drive (WD 1tb "Mybook") so I decided that my fastest solution to this problem would be to directly delete the time machine backup logs by right click > deleting them. I thought this would simply take a few minutes after clicking "empty trash" on my trash icon, however, after letting it "delete" my files over night and seeing the completion bar only move a few % of the way I canceled the operation.

Now my hard drive is still full and all signs of the files are gone.

I ran the disk utility program and it said it could not repair and must be reformatted. I have about 450gigs of movies that I really hope to keep. I also tried to partition the disk, in hopes to then drag the movies to that partition and then reformat the original partition, but aparently a complete reformat is needed to start a partition...

Does anybody have any ideas/suggestions as to how I could get myself out of this quandary?

I should add that I have no access to any more than 200gig of free hard drive space on my old external drive and maybe 50 or so on my computer, so i'm not really looking for the obvious "move them somewhere else, reformat and then replace" response.

A little confused here. Typically, a Time Machine partition is completely dedicated purely to backups. So, if you would need to reformat that partition because it's damaged, you shouldn't be losing anything but the backup (the "live" version remains intact). So, formatting it shouldn't be a big deal, because all of the originals are still on your internal drive.

Am I missing something here?