hard disk failure -- HELP!

Hi everyone,

I'm desperately soliciting suggestions from anyone about courses of
action I might take before breaking down and reformatting my internal
drive. Here's the situation:

I'm running a G5 iMac with OS 10.3.9 installed.

On rebooting, I was presented with a folder icon with a flashing
question mark which I assume means that no OS was found. I rebooted
again, and this time got a message telling me I needed to reboot my
machine. Attempting to reboot continues to generate this message,
including when I try to boot in either safe mode or single user mode.

I thought of doing an archive-and-install of my system, but my internal
drive does not show up in the installation window.

I then ran Disk Utilty and attempted to verify and repair the disk. It
reported a failure which could not be repaired.

TechTool Deluxe (the version which ships with AppleCare) reports a
failed volume structure test with an error code of -694. Attempts to
track down this code on the web have failed me. TechTool, like Disk
Utility, fails to repair the problem, though the drive passes its other
disk-related diagnostics.

Booting from either the Installer/Disk Utitity DVD or the TechTool CD
does not actually allow you to browse mounted volumes. I was hoping
that if I could access the drive, I might still be able to recover some
files even if the directory was damaged (yes, I do backup, but
unfortunately not in the past few weeks). I installed OS 10.3 onto my
iPod and booted from that, but the internal volume again does not
mount, though it does show up in system profiler. Trying to mount it
from the terminal (using diskutil) proved to be no use.

So, I have a few questions:

First, does anyone know what error -694 actually is?

Second, are other utilities (DiskWarrior is the only one I know of)
more effective at repairing volumes than TechTool or DiskUtility? I
don't want to shell out the $$$ if this is a lost cause, but at the
same time I am loathe to reformat the drive, which would appear to be
my only option for reinstalling the system, without first exploring
some options to try to first backup some recent files. (is there
anything which can be done within Open Firmware perhaps?)

Any suggestions at all would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

André

.

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