How can I recover a hard drive that Disk Utility won't even see?

I've done it before using a floppy boot disk in a PC containing something called kern and msfroot (some minimal linux installation, possibly), just wondering if there's some magic unix command that does the same thing on a Mac. The drive will be in an external firewire case. Is this something I have to do in single user mode?
Thanks for any help.

The first thing you should do, is, to remove the drive from its case and connect it to a controller using its native interface.
non fatal failures of a drive will often make the FW bridge ignore it.
better disable spotlight completely before it will make things worse. See this hint for 10.5:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071102215912892
to disable spotlight.

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Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

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How can I recover a hard drive that Disk Utility won't even see?

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