Repairing it will take quite a while. Definitely repair it! If nothing was being written to the drive at the time, you'll probably be absolutely fine. Was it in use (file transfers)?
It shouldn't take a whole day, but maybe give it a go. Do you have any other drive repairing apps like Tech Tools or Disk Warrior or something?
i did that so many times without a problem, ecpecially if the drive was idle and you were not writing to it, i don't thnk it's as bad as you seem to think. anyway what are the errors that come up when runnig disk utility?I turned off my external HD from my macbook earlier without remembering to eject it first! How bad is the damage? I ran disk utility on the external and A lot of errors and red flags came up. Disc utility was basically telling me it was ill. However, All my files (the ones I checked at least) seem to be ok so far. Is there anyway to repair the damage? I ran "repair" on disc utility but it seemed like it was taking forever and not doing anything...