hard drive won't mount or repair

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?

The exact same thing happened to me today. And I have come to the same conclusions. I hope someone answers you soon

How valuable is your data? Only you can decide if using Disk Warrior would be helpful or not. As for the Apple store warning you about the possibility of Disk Warrior doing more damage, consider it a disclaimer. How much did the Apple store say it would cost to work on the drive? Purchasing Disk Warrior would cost you around $99.