Friends, I need the advice of cooler heads than my own!

Here's what's going on:

I've been using a 320GB external firewire drive as my Mac's main startup drive.

The other day, while I had several applications open and a few downloads in process, things suddenly ground to a halt so severe that I couldn't even call up the Force Quit window.

I had to force the machine to power down by pressing and holding the power button. When I rebooted, the internal hard drive's main partition and its secondary one, which contains an eDrive created by Tech Tool Pro, were the only available startup disks.

The Finder could not see the external firewire drive, and Disk Utility could not mount it.

I rebooted from the eDrive, which happens to contain a copy of Disk Warrior. If I recall correctly, Disk Warrior was unable to see the external firewire drive at this point.

Disk Utility was unable to mount the drive, and when I attempted a repair, it gave up halfway through, due to some sort of "disk error."

Tech Tool Pro soon got to a test which the drive could not pass. I don't recall which test that was (sorry) but I think it was for File Structure or Finder Info. At any rate, TTP recommended performing a surface scan, which is something I normally never do, owing to the fact that it's so time consuming.

So I started the surface scan, left it alone for a while, and when I came back to it, TTP was reporting at least 240 bad blocks on my firewire drive.

At that point I cancelled the scan, which was nowhere near being done.

In consulting Micromat's Help documents, I noticed some talk of overheating. My firewire drive had been living in fairly close proximity to another external drive from the same manufacturer, and both of them were fairly close to my Mac. Wondering if being such close neighbors might have caused an overheating situation, I stopped fiddling with the firewire drive and went to sleep.

The next day (today), with the drive having cooled down, things seemed better at first:

My various utilities seemed to have a much easier time seeing and mounting the firewire drive, and Disk Warrior breezed right through graphing and then rebuilding the directory structure with no unexpected changes.

After that, I restarted with the firewire drive as the boot volume, and everything seemed fine for about a minute or two.

However, as soon as I launched Safari and asked it to do anything as challenging as loading a complex page or running a script, I was right back where I'd started, with the kind of hard crash from which no amount of option-command-escaping would extricate me.

Naturally, I haven't been nearly as scrupulous as I should have been about backing up all my files on a regular basis.

Therefore, rather than potentially muck things up with further attempts to rebuild the directory structure or repair damaged finder information, I thought I should maybe stop what I'm doing and try to learn the surest strategy for pulling any surviving documents off that drive before it completely gives up the ghost.

Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated, but I do understand if this is not the sort of question you'd normally get into.

Thankew so much!!!

P.S. Here are the technical details of my system:

Macintosh Mini (Power PC), 1.33ghz, OS X 10.4.11
Western Digital My Book Premium Edition, 320GB, USB/Firewire
Tech Tool Pro 4.1.2

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Gimme one more, pardner...