Harddrive problem?

my iMac (24 inch, the first of the metal cased imacs, 10.5.newest update) crashed yesterday (beachball, everything frozen) and i had to hold the power button to restart it. When it came back with was just stuck at the gray screen with the little spinning thing and the apple, and it just stayed there. I tried restarting it again to the same effect.
So i popped in my 10.5 disc and booted from the disc. when i ran Disk Utility it could not verify or repair the harddrive (invalid sibling link). so i looked it up online (using my wife's imac) and booted to single user and ran 'fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2' and then 'fsck -fy' Both failed.
Then i decided to erase the drive and re-install 10.5 (i had my user/app data backed up via Time Machine on an external drive). The re-install went fine. the comp restarted and made me watch the Welcome movie. Then when it takes you through the set up stuff, there was an option to use your Time Machine back up to recover your user info and data. I tried this. It froze up after about 5 minutes (there was no change for over 30 minutes and the external HD went to sleep). So i restarted and had the same thing happen again.
After another restart i just had the set up program create a new user account and i was able to get through it (the set up). Everything looked okay and i was able to run safari. Then i went to time machine to bring back my files and after about 5 minutes it froze up again (beach ball, everything else frozen). I restarted was and was back to the beginning: having to boot from the CD and getting the 'Invalid Sibling Link' error in disk utility.
Now i have an appointment at the Genius Bar tomorrow morning (i should still be under apple care). Does this sound like a harddrive problem since it couldnt be repaired after a clean install? Is there anything else i should try before taking it in tomorrow?
thanks in advance!

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Mac OS X doesn't have a "clean install" per se as this user tip explains:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121995&tstart=0
Now your symptoms can just as easily be software as well as hardware.
To diagnose it further, you need to make sure your data is first backed up.
Several data recovery techniques exist if you need to use them first*:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
Once you are backed up, you can examine the hard drive for issues that could cause similar behavior to hardware such as those indicated on this FAQ*:
http://www.macmaps.com/directoryfaq.html
Now if you ran the hardware test that came with your computer, you could more quickly determine if a hardware issue is easily diagnosable via these instructions:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303081
But getting no result there is no guarantee the hardware is perfect.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

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