Help: I cannot see my back-up drive

[istara]

Oh my god that worked - after the second time it repaired successfully! And when I unplugged it and plugged it back in, I can see all my data there! YAY!!!

You have absolutely no clue how miserable I was feeling before: laptop a brick costing $4k to replace, and no back up or access to my most crucial data.

Anyway I will paste the instructions from that other thread:

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Inside Disk Utility, select Disk Info, and take note of the ‘Disk Identifier’ value. Then click Unmount.*

Now open Terminal (under Applications, Utilities) and try the following:

fsck_hfs -r /dev/<the disk identifier value which you noted>
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*For me the only option was Eject, which is what I used.