3+yr old PBook no boot, now booting -but Slloooowwwllly and maybe not fully

Question

O helpful souls of .mac-BBSland:
I have a just-past-AppleCare PB that has been perfectly reliable for 3 years. It's running up-to-latest-rev Panther 10.3.9 with several apps -- Eudora, FireFox, iTunes, iPodderX, notepad were running when the problem appeared. HD was only ~85% full.
Tonite Eudora claimed some strange errormsg, NotePad was unable to write to disk. Force Quit behaved erratically, so I thought the only thing for it was to force power-down. Twice after that time, the PB was able to power-up (from a black screen, give the "startup-chord" sound, go to a light-gray screen, then to the darker apple superimposed on that, then the spinning spoke under that). No further. After about 20 minutes in that state I decided that Further Action was necessary (and natch, AppleCare was closed)
I reset the PRAM per http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238 -- no joy. Following instructions, I held down the CTRL-APPLE-P-R keys just after pressing the PWR key, waited until I heard the startup-chord twice and then released the 4 keys. The second startup-ding was perceptibly softer.
From what I could glean from http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=14449 , resetting the PMU might be the wrong next step, so I didn't do that. The computer did in fact start up its HD, give the chord-beep indicating that the HW is somewhat OK...
Next when I started up, there was a long period where the spoke spins. Then, after many minutes, the screen went blue and the touch-pad actually became capable of moving a default-shape cursor around the screen. (I use "Mighty Mouse" to change cursor shape in my normal setup, as I recall, but things don't get that far)...
After MANY (~15?) minutes of blue-screen-with-movable-cursor, things began to move forward... buttt verrrryyyy slowly... I saw some of the normal startup screens (including a new one, "Waiting for crash reporter"). At the moment, there's a white rectangle in the center of the screen, a progress bar that's about 95% to the right, with the legend "Waiting for Printing Services"... when the cursor was outside that rectangle, it's an arrow; when it was inside, it was a spinning multicolored beachball.
I just rechecked. The screen is now black, in character-mode. White chars on black screen, atop left:
Darwin/BSD (DrDans-Computer.local)(console)
Login:
for awhile there I saw the occasional errormsg
IOATAController device blocking bus.
After a few of these, I thought I should maybe blow out any dust around the kbd, so I detached it and did so. Those errormsgs disappeared.
Since I have no idea what login and pwd I should have used, I entered FOO to login, and BAR to password. I thought I was cooked.
But to my utter surprise, the screen reverted to the small cursor ATOP MY NORMAL BACKGROUND PATTERN -- snow drifts, as I recall its name.
Upon rechecking, I see the cursor has shifted to BUSY mode (one of the MightyMouse shapes specific to my login) and the top bar is beginning to SLLLOOOOWWWWWLLLYY reappear, claiming that it's DrDan's, (I have DrDan set as the auto-boot on this laptop) the time, the battery status... but as yet it hadn't turned into the expected white bar with that info in it.
Rechecking again: White bar, all normal contents (except for Airport signal status), BUSY cursor, nothing of desktop showing... Whatta cliffhanger!
And now I gots to turn in... busy workday tmw... so this is where I need to ask you folks...
As they say in the trade, *** do I do now?
If the system appears close to OK by morning, will it reboot smoothly and as quickly as before all this crap? Yeh, I understand I better back things up ASAP...
I hear normal HD sounds, and possibly a CPU fan (if there is one in this CPU). The CPU has been physically undisturbed; I use it on a cookie-sheet on my lap, so the only stresses it has been subjected to are small torsional ones.
I have my original bought Panther disks, DiskWarrior and such. No other actual MEDIA backup (natch, I was on the point of ordering a new 17" PB or at least an external backup HD, but that never happens in time, does it.)...
I'd appreciate any Words of wisdom or pointers to where such WoWs can be found... TIA folks.
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Welll... here's something from the Good News / Very Bad News department:
When I got home about 1:30 PM, DW reported to my delight that after 400,000-odd comparisons, it had come up with a replacement directory structure, and did I want to inspect it? I said yes, it looked file-for-file identical with the old stuff. I asked for details of the discrepancies and I could see there was a list of about 100 files, deep in the guts of obscure stuff, and media stuff,that were detected as damaged and repaired. Yayy, I said, deliverance is at hand...
So I told DW to start replacing the old with the repaired dir. About 30 minutes thereafter, the replacement process stopped. A red stop-sign alert was displayed, with this legend: "DW encountered an unexpected error while writing the replacement dir of the disk "Macintosh HD". Rebuild this disk again, preview the disk, and back up all files from the previewed disk (2164, 2659)."
I returned to the main DW display, and saw a green-checkmarked line containing the text "Rebuilding was stopped because of an error (2164)."
I looked under "ADVANCED" and read:
DEVICE id disk0S5
SECTORS 117,208,826
sector size 512 BYTES
Filesystem type: HFS (extended, jounalled)
Model: Toshiba mk6021gas
Looked to see what the GRAPH display might be... but after about 10 min, graphing stopped; errormsg "the disk named Macintosh HD could not be graphed, an unexpected error occurred (2403, 2658)" so I hit OK.
I came back and began the disk rebuild process once more. I figure that will be another long slog that will take another day while it starts from scratch.
Can anyone shed any light on those DW errormsg codes? Are they reliably bad enough such that after the next rebuilt dir is proposed, that I shouldn't even bother attempting to replace the old with the new dir? In other words, is this HD/PB hardware hosed as far as repairable until bootability is concerned? I fear so.
Sooo... said he, hope for this HD flagging (and the entire PB, therefore) ...
The rest of this msg is just speculation. Feel free to comment or correct!
Do you think it'd be worth it to ship the PB back to Apple for a HD transfer/fix? Probably expensive,since I just dropped out of AppleCare's 3-year max...
Foo. I'm wondering whether it's worth the candle to back up 60-ish gigabytes of data to CD, or even to DVD's. Many of the files are larger, I bet, than even a single DVD... And would some one of you gurus tell me how it's supposed to be possible, given no Airport/WiFi connection between this Mac (booted via DW CD) and my LAN, to backup stuff to CD or DVD? Is it possible to eject the DW disk that I'm currently booted off of (how?) and then insert a CD or DVD and then somehow burn media? I wonder where I can find out such info, if not from you kind folks (pointers more than welcome of course!)
Perhaps it'd be better to simply suck the data outta my dead PB wholesale...
Given that I was soon gonna buy a new PB with a larger HD than 60, and hopefully an external HD for backup use... Perhaps, since DW was able to see the disk and since I got a listing of my desktop contents during the slow-boot process, my files are in there, but the thing just won't boot (and there is probably a bad sector where there must not be one, to make the system bootable?).
I've heard of "Target Mode" where another Mac (that is undamaged and able to do boot) comes up, and then (somehow using target mode) makes a connection via a FW or USB connection between it and an old, bad Mac like mine with an unbootable internal HD but with data that need saving. Would it work if I just bought a new PB and then via target mode sucked all my data files (iTunes, email etc. going back years) onto the new PB's HD? If my understanding of Target Mode is correct, it would be useless with an external HD that was not bootable on its own.
Where do I learn more about Target Mode? If I were to use Target Mode between two FW 400 PB's (or a PB with an HD?), do I need a cable with standard FW-400 male plugs on both ends?
Speaking of new PB's, has anyone heard anything good about the new Intel-based "core duo" PB? I hear it's got a brighter screen, runs real fast, but has only FireWire 400 (which is what my current PB has, so perhaps that's not an issue). How compatible is it, in other words how good is "Rosetta?" I imagine I could pay a lot less for a 17" PB G4 in aluminum, with nice fast FW. But the screen's the older technology. Any thoughts?
And what's a good source of big cheap external HD's?
Tnx for your patience with all this info.