Hard Drive Error During OSX Tiger Reinstall (Urgent)

I wrote to www.macosx.com:

To Whom It May Concern:

I was running OSX Tiger on my Powerbook G4 and was experiencing some
performance issues. I was told a reinstall of Tiger might help. Using
my disk that I got from Mac I tried a reinstall (I archived the
existing system when prompted), which failed for whatever reason part
way through the process.

I did not have time to attempt this again at that time and therefore
asked the system to shut down.

Instead of now allowing me to reinstall, it says I do not have osx
v.10.3 which is necessary to install Tiger. Also the computer will not
reboot and I do not know how to access the archived system.

Please tell me which commands I need to type in when prompted on
startup. Or whatever else I need to do. Right now my only options are
to hold down the power and get the cmmand screen which allows me to
mac-boot or shut-down or on startup i can hold the c button which runs
the disk and then tells me i don't have 10.3 or it just sits there with
the apple and the spinning disk.

FYI, I have the MAC 0s 9 disk with me as well, but that's it since I am
travelling in Kenya.

Thank you very much for your help.

Regards,

Jacob


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www.macosx.com wrote back to me:

The format of your hard drive has been messed up. Try the following...

Boot from your install disk and have Disk Utility (Utilitiesisk
Utility) repair your hard drive. Do this as many times as it takes
until no errors are reported.

Next, have Disk Utility Repair Permissions on your hard drive. Then try
to reinstall the system again.

If Disk Utility can not repair the errors you will need to reformat the
drive and install the system from scratch.

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I wrote back to www.macosx.com:

Thank you for your reply. The repair did not go through unfortunately.
i tried multiple times and every time i get the same message:

Incorrect block count for file system.log
(It should be 33 instead of 63)
Keys out of order
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.

Error: the underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

I really do not want to have to reformat the hard drive, as that sounds
like deleting everything on it and resetting it. I forgot to mention
that i do have an external hard drive with me that has my laptop backed
up from march, without tiger but with osx 10.3 or something. Could
this be used to solve my problem? i have a lot of data and photos on
the computer that i would hate to lose.

Please walk me through all the baby steps if possible. I am a real
novice with macs.

Thank you for your help. I truly appreciate it.

Jacob

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