How to enable owners on a firewire disk?

[Pismo-Bill]

I have read the thread,
<http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=62572> and know that I am not familiar enough with Unix to be able to modify your answer fit to my situation.
Here is the problem...I use an external firewire hard drive as backup for my very aging iMac G3 450 mhz running OSX 10.3.9. Yesterday when trying to save a file to the external drive, I received a error message that the file name was too long. I modified the name and still no dice. I rebooted the machine and when it started back up the external firewire drive would not mount, no image on the desktop. I ran the disk utility and it said that the disk was OK. I noticed that the "Repair Permissions Button" was grayed out.
I ran Disk Warrior and it went through the whole process of rebuilding the directory but at the very end could not replace the old directory and reported and unknown error.
When I use 'Get Info' in Disk Utility it shows the firewire drive's permissions are not enabled. When I click the Mount button, I can see the light on the firewire hd flash but it will not mount.
Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks,