All of a sudden unaccessible imac internal hard drive, renamed "disk1s3"

Hello,
I am having a very serious problem and I hope someone can help.
Yesterday I turned on my imac G5 1.8ghz running Mac OS X (10.4.10) and I got this message:
*"the disk you have inserted is not readable by this computer"*. Not having inserted any disk I just clicked ignore and restarted the imac. After the restart it looked like the computer frose, I could see my desktop wallpaper but none of the files on my desktop and then when I restarted again the computer I had the case of grey screen with the blinking question mark/file icon.
Knowing that this means that the computer can't find a startup disk, I restarted the computer and inserted the CD with the OS X and opened utilities manager from the CD.There I saw that the internal hard drive has been renamed "disk0S3" and the only info the manager was giving me was that it was not mounted, it's size and that it is mac OS Extended (Journaled) formated. I tried to repair it but I got an error message each time I tried.
I tried to restart the computer several times during the day and each time I had the grey screen/globe followed by the grey screen/blinking question mark folder. At one point the computer went into a kernel screen and frose.
I then tried to restart in target mode and use the utilities manager from my intel 2Ghz Macbook. In target mode the fans of the imac go nuts, it sounds like the computer is going to take off and then I get on the MacBook the *"the disk you have inserted is not readable by this computer"* message. There the manager recognizes the internal hard drive of the imac as "disk1s3" and gives me the same info as the OS X CD manager.
If I click on the icon of the hard drive "above" on the utilities menu, the manager recognises the imac as AAPL FireWire Target Media, it's size, it's write status, apple partition map but says that the S.M.A.R.T. status is not supported.
I shuted down and restarted in target mode but now, when I try to open the imac in target mode it goes into target mode but the MacBook freezes.
Now I must say that this happened out of nowhere. I didn't do any software update, I didn't perform any different task on the imac from the ones I normally perform.
I have so many important files in that computer I cannot begin to describe how serious the situation will be if I lose them all. I know I should back-up my files and I usually do but now it's been a while and I am really learning the lesson the hard way.
Please if someone can help I would really appreciate it.
I apologize for the length of the post but I tried many things before posting here and I thought that it would be useful to give as many details as possible to someone that could help.
Thank you in advance

Welcome to Discussions - the fact that the S.M.A.R.T. status is not recognized and the flashing questions mark appear seem to indicate that your hard drive has failed. If you have access to TechToolPro or Disk Warrior, try to use them to check the drive status. This will likely not work, and I'm afraid your disk is toast.
You could try to remove the drive and put it in an external case and try to mount it on your MacBook, but I don't hold out much hope for that either. You can try using [Data Rescue|http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/211375] to retrieve your data.
You can also take it in to Apple and see what they say. Please let us know how things turn out,

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