Blue screen freeze at start up desparate dad pleads for help..

It's been a longgg time...
My kids use my old G4 AGP "Sawtooth" with a CPU upgrade and a SATA card for it's hard drive.
I have 10.4.11 installed.
Of course, my daughter has her homework and other data on teh hard drive without backup... (yeah, I know)
When I try to startup, everything seems normal at first. We get teh silver screen and the spinning wheel. Then a blank blue screen and that's as far as it goes.
When I boot to the 10.4 install disc and try to run disc repair it stops on
"invalid CName in thread record" and won't finish the repair.
I have never used Terminal in my life, but when booted to the install disc, it can see every file on the drive, no problem.
I have three accounts, I'm admin and the two kids accounts. I never set up a root account (whatever that is...)
I suspect that I'm not providing the needed info but I don't know what I should be listing here to help solve this problem.
Any help to an old OS 9 guy would be greatly appreciated. I don't know how to make a bootable cd or dvd that I could bott this thing from just long enough to save my daughters files and then erase and start over.

Sounds like directory damage of some sort. A few options.
1) Buy Diskwarrior. Probably the premier tool for directory repair. There's a download version but it needs to be run from a booted drive which it seems you don't have. You can wait for delivery of the disc which will allow you to boot from the disc and run the application.
2) Buy an external firewire hard drive. Get one big enough for future backup use. Meanwhile, install a new version of the operating system on that drive, boot from the drive and see if you can even see the files on the main rive. If directory damage isn't too bad you may be able to copy critical ones, though the problem with directory damage is you don't know if you're copying a damaged file. That's when just getting Diskwarrior first may just make more sense.
OSX doesn't let you make a bootable disc just by copying files onto a CD the way OS9 used to. There's a utility called CloneX that does this, but I haven't tried it. Usually what you can do is clone hte internal drive to an external drive as part of backup. The cloning places a bootable copy of the OS onto the external. Simply dragging OS files across no longer works.
By the way, the external drive has to be Firewire in order for it to be boootable. USB is okay for backup but you can't use it to boot an older computer in an emergency (new Macs are okay).

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