External Firewire Troubles, External Firewire Drive Won't Unmount/Er Options

[banevt]

Hello all
I have an ibook G3 running OSX 10.3.9. My issue is with an external firewire 400 drive I have. The other day I tried to trash something on the drive and it wouldn't go to the trash. I tried restarting but still it wouldn't let me trash anything. I tried to run Disk Utility and repair the disk but it said it couldn't do it because the drive wouldn't unmount and is still in use. I checked to see if any applications were running but nothing else was running. I have to force eject it from the Terminal just to unmount it from my desktop. I backed up all my data and as I was backing it up I found that a lot of the recent files I'd been working with wouldn't copy becuase they could not be read or written. So I tried to erase the drive but I get the same error message about not being able to unmount the drive. I have tried Disk Warrior and it gives me the same message. I've tried logging out and back in. Booting from a startup CD, and booting up in safe mode. I can't figure out what the problem could be. The fact that I can't even erase the firewire drive from the CD boot makes me fear the drive may be dead. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Valente