Help! Hard Drive Crash!

[bazookaman]

while I'm sorry that you got a nice hard drive crash for your birthday. I can't help but feel better knowing that I'm not the only one who uses terms such as "little rotatey thingy" and "Disk FUBAR, cannot fix".

[Black Landlord]

What ended up in the passport case?
Where did the original drive end up?
Can you pop the original drive in the Passport case, boot from it, and run DW on the internal?
The fact that you can read the drive remotely and repair permissions strongly suggests the directory or boot sector or whatever got hosed can be fixed.
I don't know what a bootable copy of DW will do for you that trying to repair the drive from another mac couldn't. Maybe you need to let that beachball spin for a few minutes (or even hours?). You can launch the console to see if anything's actually happening during the beachball phase.