Partition on external drive disappeared

I have an external firewire drive with multiple partitions.  One of them has disappeared - I can see it in Disk Utility (with a generic partition name) but cannot mount it or repair it.  Yes, I ran DU from Lion's recovery partition.
I've scanned the archives and it looks like the general advice is to use DiskWarrior.  However, I don't want to drop $100 on this; losing this data would be an annoyance, not a problem.   are there any cheap/free recovery/repair tools out there that are worth trying? it's worth an effort before I toss it in and reformat.
10.7, oldish MacBook Pro, terabyte iomega drive, if any of that is helpful.

It is also possible that the drive has had the invisible bit set, this has become surprisingly common (a bug report was filed some time ago, but it still hasn't been fixed). Take a look at my article describing the problem and giving a couple of solutions:
http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/invisible.html
See if that helps.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

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