I use an external firewire HFS+ formatted hard drive with Gentoo. It always tells me that the file system is unclean and will be mounted read only, even thought the OS X disk utility says everything is A-OK..

In a grand moment of stupidity, I decide to try hfsck on it. It says it found some errors and I told it to go ahead and fix them. Now the drive is hosed. Neither OS X or Linux can mount it. Disk Warrior doesn't know what to do with it. Now I'm missing two years worth of backups and I learned the hard way that hfsck is not for HFS+ partitions.

Is there anything I can do to salvage my data?

Please help. Thanks in advance.

From what your describing, probably not. In the future, with this type of filesystem attached, you can disable the fsck feature by using tune2fs or change the numbers at the end of the line in your fstab entry to 0 0.

Not sure if they can help but there is a company called Pivar that does data conversion from one media type to another. They also can recover some drives. They've been around forever (I used them back in the early 90s to recover a Xenix hard drive).

Their web site is www.pivar.com.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll see what Pivar has to offer.